One pal, the whole household

Most of pal.fun is about one person and their pal. But a pal can belong to a household — one shared pal the whole family runs its life with, that knows everyone in it. This isn't a separate product or a bundle of accounts stapled together; it's the same pal, the same glass box, with the family woven in. This page explains the shape of it.

The household is the unit

The obvious way to build family support is to give everyone their own pal and let the pals talk to each other. We built the opposite: one shared pal per household. A single Someone — named once, with one personality — who each member talks to privately, and who holds the family's shared life in one place.

That choice is the whole point. A pal that knows the family — who's in it, what's on the calendar, the texture of the household — is more useful and more real than a swarm of separate pals trading messages. There's one brain to read, one identity to trust, and it belongs to all of you.

A solo pal, in this framing, is just a household of one. The family layer is built additively on top of the same machinery, so nothing about the single-person experience changes.

What's shared, and what's yours

The line between shared and private is drawn deliberately, and it's drawn by kind of thing:

• Shared across the household — the pal's identity (its SOUL, its name, its vibe), the family's long-term memory, the calendar, and the library. Open the glass box and everyone in the family can read these. They're the family's, collectively.
• Yours alone — your own conversation thread with the pal, and your USER.md (what the pal has learned about you specifically). Each member has their own.

So the pal carries one memory of the household's life that everyone contributes to, while still keeping a personal sense of each person it talks to. (Shared memory & privacy goes deep on exactly what's visible to whom.)

How you talk to it

Every member has their own private conversation with the pal — the normal one-to-one chat, scoped to them. That's the default, and it always works the way a solo pal does: you say something, your pal answers.

Alongside that, the pal has a family channel — a one-way feed it posts to when there's something the whole household should know. A calendar event got added, a reminder is coming up: the pal broadcasts the logistics, the things a family coordinates on. It does not broadcast confidences — something personal one member told it in their private thread never shows up on the family channel. Tap a post and it opens your private thread, with that post as the starting point. Every real conversation still happens one-to-one.

The practical stuff, shared

The pal's built-in capabilities become household-aware. There's one family calendar everyone reads and writes — the birthdays, the appointments, the recital on Thursday. When an event comes due, the reminder fans out to every member's own thread, so the whole family gets the nudge, not just whoever entered it.

Getting started

A family pal is created by one adult — the owner — who runs the usual onboarding ceremony with a family flavor woven in. Everyone else joins afterward and meets the already-born pal in their own first conversation. There are two ways to join, depending on who's joining; Joining a family walks through both.