What's actually happening between Gmail and your phone.
Here’s the work Motherboard quietly takes care of while you go about the rest of your day.
Motherboard scans your inbox for receipts.
At onboarding, Motherboard reads back through the last 12 months of order confirmations in your Gmail to seed the inventory. After that, Motherboard tracks new purchases as they come in — pulling out item name, category, brand, size, retailer, date, and price. Everything else in your inbox stays untouched.
Motherboard reads your family calendar.
Once Motherboard knows what each kid owns, Motherboard looks at what's coming up on the calendar — a soccer season starting, picture day, a family vacation, a change in the weather. Each event hints at what a kid is going to need. A growth-curve estimate fills in the rest: if your kid was wearing a certain size more than nine months ago, there’s a good chance they’ve outgrown it.
Motherboard sends you a text.
When the inventory and the calendar line up against something a kid is about to need, Motherboard texts you — like a friend with a really good memory, not another app demanding your attention. You reply with one of three options — BUYING NOW, ALREADY HAVE, STILL FITS — and Motherboard updates the inventory based on what you say.
What Motherboard works with.
Motherboard works with most major retailers that sell kids’ clothes, shoes, and gear — including the niche brands your sister-in-law told you about. If you’ve ordered something for your kid from somewhere on the internet, there’s a strong chance Motherboard already knows about it.
The first minute.
Once Motherboard launches, setup is quick. Connect your Gmail, sign in with the Google account where your shopping confirmations land, approve read-only access to your inbox and calendar, and add your kids’ names and ages. From there, Motherboard builds the first inventory in the background while you go on with your day, and your first nudge text arrives the next day.
Join the waitlistThis is what arrives on your phone.
Reply: BUYING NOW / ALREADY HAVE / STILL FITS
Things we know you're going to ask.
Does Motherboard read all of my emails?
No. At onboarding, Motherboard scans the metadata — sender, subject line, the small preview snippet — of the last 12 months of messages to identify order confirmations. After that, Motherboard scans daily for any new purchases. It only reads the messages that land in Gmail’s Purchases folder, and even then the body is used once to extract the structured items, then immediately discarded. Your personal emails, school messages, work email, and group chats never have their body content read.
What happens if I cancel?
Log into your account at my.motherboard-app.com, head to your Profile page, scroll to the bottom, and tap Cancel & delete my account. That cancels your recurring subscription and deletes every record Motherboard has of your inventory and your kids in one tap. Motherboard also revokes its access to your Gmail and Calendar at the same time.
Where does the data live?
Your inventory lives on secure Google Cloud servers in the US. Motherboard does not sell your data, share it with retailers, or use it to train AI models. Two third parties touch your data, only for the specific purpose they serve: Anthropic (whose AI does the inventory extraction; per their API terms, your data is never used to train models) and Pingram (which sends and receives the text messages).
What about my financial information?
Motherboard does not read or store payment card numbers, bank account information, or any financial credentials. The fields it extracts from an order confirmation are: item name, category, size, retailer, date, and price. That's it.
Join the waitlist.
Motherboard launches soon. Drop your email and you’ll be one of the first in.