What we want to build

AllergyEZ started as a card for our own daughter. It works, and it is free, and it will stay free.

But a card is a workaround. It exists because the world hands a parent a menu in a language they can't read, a label that lists twelve ingredients and hides a thirteenth, and a waiter who has never been told what anaphylaxis is. We would rather fix some of that than keep printing better workarounds for it.

Here is what we want to fund. We are not there yet, and we will say plainly where we are at every step.

Labels a parent can actually trust

"May contain traces of" means nothing. It is not defined, not tested against, and not required to be accurate — a manufacturer can print it out of caution or omit it out of confidence, and a parent has no way to tell which. Meanwhile the allergen that would actually hurt your child can sit inside "natural flavouring" and never be named.

This is fixable, and it has been fixed before. Sesame became the ninth labelled allergen in the United States in 2023 because people pushed for it, for years, unglamorously. We want to be part of the next push: precautionary labelling that means something, thresholds that are tested rather than guessed, and ingredient names a frightened parent can read in the three seconds they have in a supermarket aisle.

Adrenaline in reach of the families who need it

An epinephrine auto-injector is the difference between a frightening afternoon and a funeral. Two of them, because one is often not enough, expire every twelve to eighteen months and have to be replaced whether or not they were used. For a family already choosing between prescriptions, that is a recurring cost attached to a device they hope never to open.

We want to help families afford them, and we want them in the places children actually are — schools, camps, community centres, restaurants — rather than only in the bag of the parent who could afford two sets.

Kitchens that know what to do

Most of the danger we have met travelling was not malice. It was a kitchen that genuinely did not know that the stock had fish in it, or that wiping a board is not the same as washing it, or that "a little bit" is not a thing that exists with a peanut allergy.

Nobody had told them. That is a training problem, and training problems are solvable — in the languages this app already covers, with the cuisine-specific knowledge already in it.

Where we actually are

We are a family building a small business in the open. We are not a charity and not a nonprofit, nothing you send us is tax-deductible, and we will never imply otherwise.

So treat everything above as what we care about, not as a promise about where money goes. If you want to give to a registered food-allergy charity today — and you could do worse, they are doing this work now and they are good at it — there is a link on the support page. That would be you giving to them, nothing to do with us.

What supporting us buys today is smaller and more specific: keeping this app alive, and paying professional translators to check the languages on it, which is the single thing that would make every card safer tomorrow. That work is real, it is costed, and we publish what we spend on it.

Big intentions are cheap. We would rather be honest about the gap between what we want to change and what we can do this month, and let you watch it close.