Shared custody splits the weeks. Not the mental load.

You book the pediatrician on a Tuesday evening. The appointment falls during the other parent's week. You made the call, compared the slots, wrote down the question about the eczema, and on Sunday you will check that the health record went back in the bag. You will not be in the room.

Which tool records that work? None of them. The custody calendar says the child was at the other house. The task list says the task is ticked. The shared planner says everything is fine. Meanwhile the load was carried by one person during days they did not have custody — and nothing shows it.

Existing co-parenting apps handle logistics (2houses) or document conflict (OurFamilyWizard). Mental load apps assume one household, one table, one fridge. Nobody measures the mental load across shared custody. That is exactly what Mental Loadless does.

Shared custody splits the weeks. It does not automatically split the anticipating, the tracking and the checking. This page describes what the app connects between two households — and what it deliberately refuses to do.

One parent sends an invitation code. The other enters it and sees, before accepting, the exact list of what will be shared. Not a checkbox buried in terms of service: a consent screen that spells out the four things that cross over.

What crosses the link

• Homework for that specific child
• Their calendar: school, activities, appointments
• The custody pattern and the day swaps
• Expenses relating to them

What never crosses

• Your household members — a new partner, other children: nobody appears on the other side
• Meals, groceries, pantry inventory
• Your Private Space and its document vault
• Your couple check-ins and anything about your own life

Sharing is scoped to one child and one link, not to a household. That is what makes blended families workable without negotiation: your household can welcome a new partner and other children, and the boundary does not move. It is not a convention between well-meaning people — it is a closed list enforced server-side.

No two separated families run the same rhythm. The app covers seven, from the most common to the fully custom:

1. Alternating weeks — one week here, one week there
2. 2-2-3 — two days, two days, three days, rotating
3. 2-2-5-5 — two fixed days each, then five alternating
4. Every other weekend
5. Every other weekend plus Wednesday
6. Primary custody with visits
7. Custom 14-day grid — you draw your own cycle, day by day

Occupancy for any given day is computed through five layers of increasing priority: the base pattern, then school holidays, then public holidays, then one-off exceptions, and finally accepted swaps — an accepted swap overrides everything else. So you never have to choose between honouring the court order and reflecting real life: both live in the same calendar.

Academic zones A, B and C are built in, with ten school years of holiday dates (2017-2018 through 2026-2027). French public holidays are computed, not typed in: Easter and Ascension land correctly every year with no maintenance on your side.

Four holiday rules are available, chosen once: keep the usual rhythm, alternate every other period, split each period in half, or always at the primary household. Public holidays follow the same logic — keep the rhythm, or alternate every other one.

One detail matters more than it looks: outside known dates, the app never guesses. It says the holiday dates are not known for that period rather than extrapolating. A custody calendar that invents a holiday date is a conflict manufactured by software.

One parent proposes a swap, with an optional note. The other accepts or declines. Until it is accepted, the swap has no effect on the calendar: nobody can decide unilaterally about the other parent's days.

The history is append-only: nothing is ever rewritten retroactively. A swap accepted in March is still visible in October, exactly as it was accepted. This is not a paper trail built for blame — it is simply the guarantee that both sides of the screen see the same version of events.

No reason for a swap is ever requested. A custody calendar reveals a family situation; the app collects the strict minimum, and no new telemetry was added for this feature.

Amounts are handled in whole cents, and splitting uses the largest-remainder method with deterministic tie-breaking: €10 split three ways never loses a cent. Nobody has to arbitrate a rounding error.

The app aggregates no bank account and executes no payment. Reimbursement is a bilateral mark: one parent proposes it, the other confirms it, and the trace remains. You stay in control of the money; the app keeps the ledger, not the cash.

The amount and the receipt are encrypted with the link key, derived at acceptance and readable by both households — and only by them.

The Mental Loadless mental load index (MLI) is built on the five phases of the Daminger cycle: anticipate, identify, decide, execute, monitor. In shared custody it gains four ways of reading it.

• Per household — never per person: the unit of comparison is the household, which removes the idea of an individual scorecard
• Anticipation vs execution — who thinks, who checks, who does
• Normalised per custody day — ten tasks over five days do not weigh the same as ten tasks over nine days. Raw and normalised are always shown together, with the sentence that explains why
• Load carried outside your custody days — what each parent organises while the child is at the other home. That number appears nowhere else on the market.

A compared view with strict dual consent

The compared view across both households only exists if both parents turn it on. The moment one turns it off, it disappears on both sides at the next read. Consent lives in a single document, the link itself, read by both: asymmetry is not forbidden by a rule, it is impossible to represent.

The vocabulary is enforced by an automated check on the copy: no "score", no "ranking", no "less than", no "should". The product's words are distribution and balance. A measurement is there to start a conversation, not to settle one.

• No messaging between co-parents. In half of tense separations, a built-in chat becomes a timestamped conflict archive. You already have a phone and an email address.
• No court-certified log. Nothing in the app is designed to be produced before a judge.
• No export of the compared view. There is zero export button on the cross-household metrics — its absence is verified by an automated test. The app does not manufacture ammunition.

The contrast with the two market references

2houses (around €99 per year) does logistics well: calendar, expenses, child information. It is a coordination tool. It measures neither anticipation, nor follow-up, nor the load carried outside your custody days.

OurFamilyWizard (roughly $110 to $300 per parent per year depending on the plan) is built for documenting conflict: unalterable timestamped messaging, admissible records, access for lawyers and judges. That is genuinely useful — when the separation is already litigious and evidence is the point.

Mental Loadless targets the space between them: two parents who get along reasonably well, who do not need a case file, and who want to know how the invisible load actually splits across two homes. You are paying for measurement and coordination, not for a future court exhibit.

• Revoke at any time, without the other parent's agreement. Each of you keeps what you created; the other's data disappears from your view. The custody pattern itself is frozen read-only on both sides: deleting it would rewrite the history of an agreement that did exist.
• Per-link encryption: the key is derived on acceptance and unwrapped for both parties. A per-household key would be unreadable on one side — that technical detail is exactly why a shared expense can stay encrypted without becoming useless.
• No GDPR joint controllership. Each household remains the controller of what it creates; the link opens a bounded, revocable, consented access, documented in the processing register. You do not become legally co-responsible for your ex-partner's data.
• Never on a shared screen. Custody occupancy can appear on the household wall view; the compared metrics, never.
• The practitioner export stays strictly single-parent: the PDF you bring to a therapist or mediator never contains the other household's data.

A Family plan (€12.99/month) is required to initiate a co-parenting link — the household that opens the link is the one that carries it.

The invited co-parent pays nothing. This is not a downgraded tier or a trial: it is a free account whose scope is the single shared child. There is literally no household container that account can reach.

In practice: you do not have to talk the other parent into buying a subscription for the link to work. That is the most concrete difference from OurFamilyWizard, where each parent pays their own licence.

What if one of us is in a blended family?

Nothing changes and nothing leaks. Access is attached to the pair (the child, the link), not to the household: your new partner, your other children, your meals and your daily organisation stay invisible on the other side. You can open one link per child if you have several custody situations running in parallel.

Can I revoke the link without the other parent's agreement?

Yes, at any time and on your own. You keep what you created, the other household's data disappears from your view and vice versa. Only the custody pattern remains readable on both sides — because it documents an agreement that genuinely existed.

Who has to pay?

The parent who creates the link needs the Family plan at €12.99/month. The invited parent uses a free account, with no limitation on what is shared. One subscription is therefore enough to run the link between both households.

What exactly does the other household see?

Homework, the calendar, the custody pattern with its swaps, and expenses relating to the shared child. Nothing else. The full list is shown to you before acceptance, on the consent screen — and it does not widen later without a fresh, explicit consent.

Can I use the app in court?

That is not what it is for, and we would advise against it. There is no timestamped messaging, no certified log, no export of the compared view. If your need is to build evidence, a tool like OurFamilyWizard fits better than ours. Mental Loadless exists to understand and rebalance a load, not to build a case.

Mental Loadless is available on the App Store and Google Play, in 9 languages, hosted in the European Union. Create your household, pick your custody pattern, invite the other parent — and see, for the first time, where the load actually goes between your two weeks.