The Margin

The Margin is a family organizer and planner that keeps boards, notes, money, meals, chores, routines and a family chat in one app. Its own summary describes it as one app for the lists, notes, money, meals and family plans that usually live in five different ones. It is built for households and small teams who want the week in one place, and it keeps a full copy of your workspace in a database on each device, so a page opens without waiting on a server and the app keeps working with no signal. Margin Intelligence, the assistant built into it, answers from what you have put in, and on paid plans your own AI tools can read and write to the same records over MCP. The starting point on the site is the paper week. People have run their weeks from paper for a long time: a ledger for money, a journal for the day, tally marks for a habit. The Margin keeps the same lists and does the copying for you. Recurring cards come back on their own, streaks count themselves, and every device you use has the same page. The comparison the site draws is between writing the same list out again every week and having the recurring ones already added, with the completion time, the streak count and the budget position carried forward, on every device. Planning lives in boards. Cards carry due dates, labels, checklists, comments and the people on them; the weekly planner lays the dated cards out by day, and Google Calendar sync runs both ways so a meeting and a deadline sit on one page. The calendar colors each event by person and can pull dates out of a school letter you photograph or forward. Anything else goes to one inbox: type it, forward an email, or save a web page. Boards also hold recurring cards, checklists and templates, habits and streaks, a focus timer on the card you are on, and whiteboards. A whole board, or just one note, checklist or whiteboard, can be shared, and you can see who else has it open right now. Free allows 5 boards; Google Calendar sync starts on Pro, live presence on Family and Team. Routines turn the habits and chores you already keep into an ordered set of steps. Each step links to a habit, a chore or a checklist item you have, and you run one step at a time, with a timer if you want one. A weekly timetable sits on the calendar, exams from a datesheet have revision placed in your free time, and a My week view gathers every workspace on one page with clashes marked. You can start from a photo of a timetable or a chore chart. Free includes three routines and one week's timetable; Pro opens every routine and timetable; Family adds the kids' step-by-step routines with stars and everyone's timetable side by side; Team adds shared timetables. Notes stay markdown. Linking one note to another with two square brackets makes the other note list it underneath as a backlink. Folders, a daily journal, earlier versions you can restore and one search for everything sit alongside. A Notion or Obsidian export comes in with its folders, and lists can be brought from Todoist, Trello or Keep. Anything sealed in the Vault opens with your passphrase; while it is locked it is hidden on screen, and neither Margin Intelligence nor an AI you connect can read it. The Vault is on every plan, with 100 notes on Free. Money covers income, spending and debts in any currency. You log what you spend, record what comes in, and on Pro set budgets; the month view shows what share of a normal month's income the budgets already promise, measured against your usual pay rather than whatever has landed so far. Recurring salary is supported, and debts carry due dates. Lend someone fifty and the debt keeps track of it: if they are on The Margin too they see it on their side, and when one of you marks it paid the other confirms. Spending, income and debts are on every plan including Free; budgets start on Pro. The family hub adds chores, allowance and points. Chores rotate between the people on them and a parent checks them off; allowance pays out on its day, savings jars fill up, and points go to houses in a cup that runs by the season. Kids spend points on rewards a parent puts on the shelf. Children get profiles a parent manages, with no email address and no password, and a kitchen display mode lets a tablet or TV on the wall read like a wall calendar that knows the time, arranged from widgets for every part of Margin, where anyone can tick a chore or add to the list as themselves. Costs can be split and settled up. This is the Family plan, for up to 6 people. In the kitchen, recipes are kept and can be pulled in from a link or a photo. The week's dinners are planned with who is cooking each night, and the plan puts the ingredients on a shared shopping list sorted by aisle. Whoever goes to the store claims the run, so two people don't come home with the same milk, and the list can be sent to someone with no account. There are ideas for tonight from what is in the pantry and a step-by-step cook mode. Recipes and a shared shopping list are on every plan, with 25 recipes and 30 list items at a time on Free; the meal plan is on Family. Chat holds threads with the family, with a friend you have connected with, or with everyone in a workspace, with pictures, reactions and @mentions, and kids' profiles can join; a message written on a train with no signal sends when you are back. A team workspace shares boards, notes and chat and is billed per seat, with a hub showing who is carrying what, access roles and agents on the roster. The break room holds seven small games — The Week, Table for Six, Paper Plane, Loose Ends, plus Volley, Stack and Catch the Tasks — playable calm or against a timer, with bests following you to the phone. Margin Intelligence is the AI in the app. Ask what your week looks like, or whether anyone mentioned the wedding, and it answers from your notes, cards, calendar and money, even when the note never used the word. It asks before it changes anything, and it recognises that the Sarah in a note, on a card and in a split dinner is one Sarah. Every fifteen minutes or so it reads what is new, works out who and what keeps coming up, links things that belong together, and keeps a short list of what it has learned about you that you can read and correct under Settings, Your Brain. The Mind page draws people, projects and notes as a map; new tags, links and merge suggestions wait in a review queue on Organize. Background work runs on weave credits — 25 a month on Free, 150 on Pro — and AI actions are 75 a month on Free and 600 on Pro. The Margin speaks MCP, with 463 tools across boards, notes, money, habits, meals, recipes, chat and the household. Connecting a desktop assistant, an editor like Cursor or VS Code, Windsurf, n8n, or an agent you wrote is done over OAuth, access is per workspace and revocable at any time, and an agent's changes look like your own work with a small mark showing who asked and through which connection. Agent pacts let two or more AI agents split one job under rules the server enforces while a person makes the final decisions. A public sandbox gives any agent a made-up household, deleted about an hour after the last call. Connecting your own agent is on Pro, Family and Team. Because your device keeps a real database rather than a cache, your own writing never waits for the network, and an agent working on the server's copy does not queue behind your edits or the other way round. Changes made offline wait on the device and go up by themselves when there is a signal. On a phone, themarginapp.com is added to the home screen and installs from the browser, with push notifications; native iPhone and Android apps are with testers and coming soon to the App Store and Google Play, sharing the same account. Everything can be exported as JSON or Markdown on every plan, Free included. Plans start with a free tier that has no end date: boards, notes, habits, money, recipes and chat for you and one other person, with 5 boards, 100 notes, 10 habits, 25 recipes, a 30-item shared shopping list and 75 AI actions a month. Pro adds 600 AI actions, 150 weave credits, a morning brief, outside assistants over MCP, Google Calendar and Sheets sync, webhooks and GitHub. Family is one price for up to 6 people and adds the household side; Team is billed per seat with team agents and 50 agent pacts. Craft is part of the pitch: eight themes, some light and some dark, each with its own typefaces and colours, and each setting how things move. You can look around before signing up: Try it now opens the real app in a browser with a made-up family already in it, keeps your changes for two days, and lets you sign up from inside and keep the whole workspace. The through-line is the same list, less copying: one workspace where the week, the home and the people in it are carried forward automatically, readable offline, and editable by you and, if you choose, by an assistant you trust.