Frequently asked questions

A resource library and record keeper for foster parents, kinship caregivers, and adoptive families, built by a foster and adoptive parent. It has guides, checklists, and fillable forms for the moments nobody prepares you for, plus a private place to keep each child's records.

Children in care often count their placements by the front doors they have walked through. Every door counts. Every child matters. The name is a promise to remember that.

No. Kinship caregivers, relatives with guardianship, adoptive parents, and people still deciding whether to foster are all welcome. The resources are written for anyone caring for a child who has lived through placement.

Yes. Everything works in your phone's browser, and the My Kids record pages are built for one-handed use. The camera button opens your phone's camera directly. Add the site to your home screen and it behaves like an app.

One private record per child in your care. You keep a timeline of visits, calls, appointments, medications, incidents, school events, expenses, and good days, with photos, video, and documents attached. Each entry is timestamped and sealed the moment you save it.

When you save an entry, our server records the exact time it arrived and computes a fingerprint of the contents. Entries are chained to each other so that changing or removing an old one would show up. You can add corrections, but you cannot quietly edit history. That is what makes the record trustworthy later.

No, and that is the point. If you made a mistake, open the entry and add a correction. The original stays on record marked as superseded, with your reason and the time of the correction. If an entry should never have existed, you can void it, which marks it withdrawn but keeps it.

We cannot promise that. Rules differ by state and county, and judges decide what they admit. What we can promise is that the records are timestamped by our server, fingerprinted, chained, and logged, so you can explain exactly how they were kept. Ask the child's attorney what format they want and send a printed report.

Open the child's record, tap Report, choose a date range, and print or save it as a PDF. The report lists every entry in order with its seal and the fingerprint of every attached file. Email the PDF yourself. We never send records to anyone on your behalf.

Not yet. Today each record belongs to one login. Shared access with permissions is on the roadmap. For now, decide who keeps the record and have the other person send notes to be entered.

Nothing is deleted. Mark the placement closed and archive the child. The record stays available to you for as long as you have an account, which matters if a case reopens or a child comes back through your door.

No. Incident reports, mandated reports, and anything your licensing worker requires still go through the channels your agency set. My Kids is your own record of what happened and what you did. The incident entry type has checkboxes to note that you reported, and when.

Only you, signed in to your account. There is no shared directory and no agency portal. Counted Doors is run by one foster parent, and system access is limited to keeping the service running. Every time a file is opened, it is logged in that child's History.

Yes. They are stored in a locked vault with no public web address. Every time one is shown to you, our server checks that you are signed in and that the record is yours. A copied link does not work for anyone else.

No. The records are never sent to any AI service. The AI tools on Counted Doors work only from what you type into those tools.

We direct them to you. If we are ever served with a court order we must obey, we will tell you before responding unless the order forbids it, and we will release only what it requires.

Every child record, file, and history line is deleted with it. Export a report first if you want a copy.

The blog, the free resources, two downloads a month, up to five saved resources, and previews of the state guides. You can also create your account and look around without entering a card.

Unlimited downloads, every paid resource and state guide, the fillable forms, the AI tools, and new content every month. It is $7.99 a month or $49.99 a year.

Any time, from Account Settings. You keep paid access until the end of the period you already paid for, and you keep your account and your My Kids records on the free plan afterward.

Mentors who are matched through the Mentor Network receive paid access at no charge. If you run an agency or support group and want access for your families, write to us and we will work something out.

SHA-256 over a canonical JSON serialization with sorted keys of: child id, entry type, title, body, structured details, the user-supplied occurredAt, the server-set recordedAt, the id of any entry being corrected, and the sorted SHA-256 hashes of all attached files. The chain hash is SHA-256 of the previous chain hash, a colon, and the content hash. The first entry per child uses the literal string GENESIS as its predecessor.

The browser uploads directly to private object storage using a server-issued token scoped to that user's and child's path prefix. The server then re-reads the stored bytes and computes SHA-256 over them. That server-side value is authoritative. For files up to 50 MB, the browser also computes SHA-256 with WebCrypto before upload, and both values and whether they matched are recorded.

There is no API route that updates entry content. Corrections insert a new row referencing the original through previousVersionId. Voiding writes voidedAt and a reason without touching content or hashes. Entry sequence numbers are unique per child at the database level, so two writers cannot produce the same position in the chain.

Yes. Every entry page shows its content hash, chain hash, and previous chain hash, and the Verify button calls an endpoint that recomputes every hash for that child from stored data in sequence order. It reports the first sequence number where any stored value disagrees. Printed reports include the hashes so a third party can check them against the live record.

The database is PostgreSQL on Neon. Files are on Vercel Blob with private access. The application runs on Vercel. All three encrypt data at rest and serve only over TLS, and all host this data in United States data centers. Authentication is handled by Clerk.

An append-only table of events: record created, updated, archived, restored; entry created, corrected, voided; file uploaded, viewed, downloaded; contact created, updated, removed; report generated. Each event stores the action, the related record ids, structured details such as the hash and size of an uploaded file, the request IP address, and the user agent.

JPEG, PNG, HEIC, WebP, GIF; MP4, QuickTime, WebM, 3GP; MP3, M4A, WAV, WebM audio; PDF, Word, and plain text. Up to 500 MB per file. Originals are stored as received with no transcoding, resizing, or metadata stripping.

Not yet. The report endpoint returns JSON that the printable page renders, and a machine-readable export with hashes is planned. Tell us what your agency or court actually accepts and we will build to that.