About
A founder's note.
Smitty was built for my own family before it was built for yours.
Four years ago, I was living in San Diego, happily single, and not looking to date anyone with kids. Then I met my partner while he was visiting from San Francisco and figured a couple of dates couldn't hurt.
I flirted too hard, and now I live in SF with him and my four stepdaughters.
Becoming a stepmom in my thirties meant learning family logistics from scratch with no muscle memory for any of it. And what I found was staggering. Four schools' worth of email. Sports schedules, carpools, volunteer signups, birthday lunches you cannot miss, the classroom that always needs snacks. The mental load of running a family is enormous, mostly invisible, and almost always carried by one person.
I went looking for a tool to help. Everything I found was a calendar. But a shared calendar doesn't reduce the mental load. It just makes it look prettier. Someone still has to read every email, decide what matters, type it in, and remember to look at it later. The work isn't the calendar. The work is being the human router for everything coming at your family.
Becoming a stepmom also gave me a new way to relate to my friends who are bio-moms. The more we talked, the more I realized none of this is unique to me. They're doing the same invisible work, mostly alone, while trying to hold down careers and make sure every kid gets to every place with the right stuff on the right day. The mental load isn't a me problem. It's a mom problem.
Then, in the span of a few months: my partner got sick with an illness we're still trying to diagnose. I had surgery of my own. Our oldest broke her leg and needed surgery too. And right around then, I learned my job was being eliminated.
Suddenly I had the time, the motivation, and a painfully clear problem to solve.
So I built a prototype for our family and named it Smitty, after my partner's last name, Smit. It stuck.
The moment I knew it was working: I was recovering from surgery when Smitty texted me that the kid recovering from her surgery had quietly signed up to host her team's end-of-year party. Her coach had emailed us to confirm, but I would have missed it completely without Smitty reading the email and flagging it that evening. Crisis averted, in a season when one more dropped ball would have broken me.
That's what Smitty is for. Not to make your calendar prettier. To carry the mental load of family logistics so you can be fully in the moments you don't want to miss.
I'm building Smitty for every parent holding too much in their head because I know exactly how that feels.
— Alison, Founder
What we will, and won't, do
The promises.
We will not sell your data.
There’s no advertising business here, no broker downstream, and no plans to add one. Your subscription is the entire business model.
We will not train models on your messages.
The LLM providers we use operate under zero-retention enterprise terms. We don’t feed your family’s life into anyone’s training set.
We will confirm before acting.
Smitty acts when it's sure, asks when it isn't, and shows you everything either way.
We will tell you when we get it wrong.
Every email Smitty processed shows up in the Activity view on the web app. You can see and correct what the AI did. Silent failure is a trust-breaking moment we will not ship.
The mechanics of these promises live on the security page.
Say hello.
Founders read every email. Tell us what your week looks like and what would actually help.