Hey, I’m Ruben, one half of the team behind Snug. I’m a software developer with about four years of experience, mostly focused on scheduling software.
My girlfriend Mel handles the sales, marketing, and testing side of things. Together we decide on features and direction.
This post is really just the story of how Snug came to be, starting with the app fatigue that led to it.
I’ve been through the whole productivity app cycle trying to find a family organizer that actually works.
Started with Notion. Built a “second brain.” Spent weeks organizing everything perfectly. Then I forgot about it because hey, it’s in my second brain, I can forget it now. That kind of defeated the purpose.
Moved to Todoist. Liked it for a while. Then they introduced that thing where you type “mar 11” and it automatically turns it into a recurring task. Small thing, but it drove me crazy. I just want to type what I mean without the app guessing.
Google Calendar + Google Tasks was next. Worked okay for me solo, but try assigning tasks to someone else. Or making a recurring task with subtasks. It falls apart pretty quickly.
Since I work on scheduling software for a living, I had a decent sense of what tends to go wrong, and what matters most when you’re trying to keep a household in sync.
Mel and I live in different countries. I’m in Belgium, she’s in Indonesia. We’re figuring out visas, planning holidays, coordinating across timezones. We needed something to share tasks and calendars without it feeling like we’re managing a Jira board together.
Every app we tried was either too simple (just a shared list) or too complex (12 sidebar items, 40 settings, premium tier for basic features). Nothing hit the middle ground.
Building a family organizer that doesn’t overwhelm
So we built Snug.
It was also a chance to push my skills and take Claude Code for a serious test ride. It’s a productivity booster, though I’d add that without a software engineering background, it can write code that looks solid on the surface but hides bugs you won’t catch until much later.
Anyway, here’s Snug. It has the stuff you’d expect: shared calendars, recurring tasks, reminders, projects. But it doesn’t overwhelm you with features. No steep learning curve. No corporate feel. It’s meant to feel like a family bulletin board, not a project management tool.
That’s it. That’s why Snug exists. If you’ve been through the same app fatigue, maybe give it a try.