Family Calcs

Here's something most people don't know until they're going through a divorce: courts don't care about "every other weekend." They count overnights. Specifically, they count whether your kid sleeps at your house enough nights per year to cross a threshold that changes how custody gets classified and how much child support gets calculated.

Every state has a different number. Maryland is 92. New Jersey is 104. Some states use formulas. Some don't have a hard line at all. And most parents going through the worst experience of their lives have no idea what their state's number is, let alone whether their proposed schedule hits it.

I built Custody Calc to fix that.

What It Is

Custody Calc is a parenting schedule builder that does the math courts actually care about. You pick a schedule pattern (2-2-3, week-on-week-off, 2-2-5-5, whatever works for your family) and it tells you instantly how many overnights each parent gets and whether you're above or below your state's threshold.

It covers all 50 states plus DC. It handles holidays with alternating years built in. It exports court-ready PDFs for attorneys and mediators. And it syncs to your phone's calendar so you always know whose night it is without texting your ex.

Why It Exists

My wife runs a family law firm. I've watched her spend billable hours manually counting overnights on paper calendars. I've watched her clients — parents who are already stressed, scared, and overwhelmed — try to figure out what "shared custody" actually means in their state, using tools that were either too complicated or too expensive.

The main competitor in this space charges $50/year, hasn't meaningfully updated their UI in a decade, and buries the one number that actually matters behind a wall of features most parents will never use. The other option is a $100/year platform designed more for ongoing co-parent communication than for the critical moment when you're building the schedule in the first place.

There was a gap. Focused tools that do one thing well, at a price that doesn't make you feel like you're being exploited during one of the hardest periods of your life.

The Stack

• Next.js + TypeScript for the app
• Neon PostgreSQL for the database
• Clerk for authentication
• Vercel for hosting
• Turborepo monorepo because I'm building a suite, not just one app

The Bigger Picture

Custody Calc is the first app in a planned suite called Family Calcs. The idea is modular, focused tools. Each one does its job well and doesn't try to be everything. Child Support Calc is next. After that: expense tracking, co-parent messaging, and a few more.

The philosophy stays the same: build specialized tools that respect both the parent's situation and the attorney's time.

The Part I'm Most Proud Of

State overnight threshold data. I manually verified thresholds across all 50 states plus DC using actual statutes and legal surveys. It sounds boring. It is boring. But it's also the thing competitors can't easily replicate, and it's the thing that makes a parent say "oh, that's the number I need" instead of spending three hours on Google trying to figure out if 128 overnights means they have shared custody in Virginia.

That lookup alone — knowing your state's number and seeing instantly where your schedule lands relative to it — is worth more than any feature list.

Try It

Head to custodycalc.app and build a schedule. The free plan gets you started. The Parent plan ($4/month) unlocks overnight calculations, holiday scheduling, PDF exports, and calendar sync.

If you're an attorney, there's a Professional plan too. Your clients will thank you.