Your family's own address
Every Kumbaa archive lives at its own address, like yourfamily.kumbaa.app. It starts out random, and the owner can pick a better one in Curate → Settings. That address is the family's private website: the tree, the people, the albums and the stories, in one place.
Who can see it?
Only the members you invite. Every page and every photo checks that whoever is asking belongs to that family. A link to a photo can be shared in a family chat, but whoever opens it still has to sign in as a member. Someone who isn't invited sees a note to ask the family's curator, and nothing about the family, not even its name.
Roles: owner, curator and viewer
- Owner. Exactly one. Can do everything, hand over ownership, and delete the archive.
- Curators. Edit the archive, add and share photos, name faces, invite people, and change members' roles.
- Viewers. Look around. A viewer who is in the tree can also edit their own corner of it: their parents and grandparents, brothers and sisters, everyone below them, and the people they married.
How do invitations work?
In Curate → Family, a curator types in one or more email addresses and picks a role: "look around" or "help curate". Then they share the family link. The link is safe to post anywhere, because it only lets in people whose verified email is on the list. Everyone invited joins free; whoever starts the archive is the only one who pays.
Is it really private?
- Archives are behind sign-in, and closed to search engines and crawlers.
- Your family's content is never used to train AI models.
- Faces are found in your own browser, not by sending photos off somewhere.
- Contact details are for the living only, and only shown to members. Living people's birthdays are kept to the month.
- Invitations, role changes and removals are written to the family's activity log.
Can we get everything out?
Yes, whenever you like. Download any photo's original, a whole album as a zip, or a backup of the archive itself. Kumbaa also stores a backup of every archive each Sunday. If your plan ends, the archive stays for 30 days so you can take it with you.
More than one family?
A person can belong to several archives, with a different role in each. And someone who married in can start their side of the family as a linked archive of its own. Planning a get-together? See Kumbaa for family reunions, or check the pricing.