How a daycare in our living room became TinyGuard.
My wife Laura started a licensed home-based daycare. I started writing software the night she had to tell a parent "I don't know how to get the footage from this morning." Here's everything that happened between then and now.
The daycare came first
I'm Del. My wife Laura runs Sunshine Day Care, a licensed home-based child care center in Tigard, Oregon. The play area is what used to be our living room. The napping nook is what used to be a study. The cameras you'll see on the dashboard — six of them — are looking at the rooms our son grew up in. The Pi sits in the corner where we used to keep books.
I'm a software engineer by trade. When Laura applied for her license, I built her a website. I picked the colors. I expected to stay out of the way of the actual business — daycare is a craft, and software people generally don't belong in crafts they don't practice.
Three months in, the cracks showed. Laura was running six different tools to operate one small business: a billing app that couldn't tell her who was current, a parent-messaging product the parents hated, attendance recorded on paper, a camera DVR that wrote to a hard drive in a closet, food logs in a three-ring binder, and the State of Oregon's child-care subsidy portal — which timed out every fifteen minutes and lost the entry if you weren't watching the clock.
The thing that broke it was the cameras.
A parent asked to see the footage from earlier that morning — the kind of normal, kind, anxious question every parent of every small kid asks. Laura said yes, of course, give me a minute, and went to the closet where the DVR lived. She came back ten minutes later and said, I don't know how to get it. I'll figure it out and call you tonight. She did not figure it out. The DVR's web UI wouldn't let her in. The phone-app version had been deprecated. The whole point of the cameras — having something to show a parent — collapsed in a single afternoon.
That night I opened my laptop.
Sixty days, every weeknight
The first commit to TinyGuard's repository was on a Saturday afternoon: March 22, 2026. There's no need to dress it up — it was a "hello world" Express server and a `package.json`. By that Sunday it was React. By the end of the first week, video from one camera worked. By the second week, all six. We had HLS streams with cryptographically-signed segment URLs so nothing could be hot-linked off the internet.
For sixty days I shipped almost every weeknight after the kids went down. Some Saturdays, the whole day. I am not a video engineer. I learned MediaMTX by reading its source. I learned ffmpeg by failing at it until it worked. I learned how a Raspberry Pi 5 handles six concurrent AV1 encodes by accidentally throwing one into a thermal throttle in our living room and reading the kernel logs while Laura asked, politely, what the smell was.
The receipts are public — every commit is in our git history. The first month was video, auth, a care-log, and a parent portal. The second month was everything else: billing, payments, CCDF subsidy billing, staff scheduling, compliance reports, automatic offsite recording backup, push notifications when a camera goes offline, and a checklist app for the morning health screens that licensed daycares have to log every day.
A small library of things that went wrong
The transcoder caught fire. Not actually fire — but the AMD Ryzen test rig in my office pinned one CPU core at 100% for three days during a libsvtav1 calibration run and the heatsink discolored. The fans had been at supersonic for so long I'd stopped noticing them. The rig still works. We learned to ramp the encoder preset.
The database bill blew up in eight days. We moved from a local Postgres on an EC2 instance to Neon, a serverless Postgres that's much cheaper if your traffic is light — and at the time, our traffic was a fraction of one daycare. The free tier capped at 5 GB of data transfer a month. We hit it in eight days because a logging job didn't know about the cap. The whole site went 402 across the wire. I upgraded to the Launch plan that same hour, then I wrote a rule for the team: no full-table reads against prod outside the backup workflow, ever. Discipline is cheaper than a sales-stopping outage.
WireGuard worked, then didn't need to. The Pi originally talked to the API through a WireGuard VPN tunnel I'd set up — secure, fast, free if you ignored the cost of running the server. It worked beautifully for a month. Then Cloudflare quietly opened up their Tunnel service for free, and Tunnel does the same job with zero servers and zero attack surface. We cut over on April 16th. WireGuard's a good piece of software. I miss it. I don't miss running it.
Our EC2 instances got terminated. Two of them, on May 5th. Not by an attacker — by us. We'd outgrown them. Cloudflare Workers were faster, ten times cheaper, and didn't require me to remember which flag turned off termination protection at 11 PM on a Sunday. We retained the disk images for thirty days as a panic-button revert path. We never pressed the button. They expired on the 15th.
A small library of things that went right
The video pipeline is genuinely good. Cameras pump native H.264 over RTSP. MediaMTX takes the feed once. Recording forks off and encodes AV1 — roughly a third the storage of H.264 for the same picture quality — and segments to Cloudflare R2 (basically S3 at a tenth the price), where each hour-long clip lives for ninety days. Live video stays H.264 and goes out through Cloudflare Calls — Cloudflare's WebRTC SFU — so the Pi sees one viewer per camera no matter how many parents are watching simultaneously. The Pi 5 in our living room handles all six cameras at about 50% of one core. There is real CPU headroom for the next thing.
The team is real. TinyGuard is built by me and a fleet of twelve specialized AI coding agents, each with a name and an area of ownership. Billy writes backend routes. Frank handles the React frontend. Tim writes regression sentinels — 1,225 files and over 35,000 individual assertions at last count. Sam audits the security model. Chris fights the CI pipeline. Bob does pricing and outreach. Magenta does the brand. Luther does compliance (HIPAA, BIPA, state child-care licensing). Doug breaks things on purpose to surface bugs. Al runs the AI features and the cost controls around them. Maya is starting on the mobile app. Larry — that's the one I borrow when I'm in the hardware lab — handles the Pis and the network. They coordinate through a Cloudflare Durable Object so two agents can never claim the same sprint number at the same time. It is the strangest team I've worked on. It is also, by a wide margin, the most productive.
The math actually works at $99. The base plan is $99 a month for a reason that isn't marketing. The entire stack — six cameras, recording for ninety days, every feature on the page, every webhook, every integration — runs on a Raspberry Pi 5 plus a few dollars a month of Cloudflare for the cloud parts. $19 of Postgres. The biggest single line item in our monthly infrastructure bill is the AI features, and those are paid for by the customers using them. We don't have to charge $500 a month to make the math work. That's why we don't.
Where we are today
Sunshine still has six cameras. The Pi still sits in our living room. Laura still runs her daycare; she just doesn't run six tools to do it anymore. The Oregon subsidy portal we still can't help with — the state owns that, and the state will solve it on the state's clock — but everything else Laura used to do with a binder, a closet DVR, an email inbox, and her own time, she now does on one screen on her phone.
The features that exist today, today: live camera feeds with secure tokenized URLs; ninety-day cloud recording; care logs with AI-generated daily summaries for parents; attendance and clock-in for staff; tuition billing via Stripe; CCDF subsidy + copay reconciliation; ACH parent payments via Stripe; SMS notifications; push notifications; admin dashboards; multi-facility brand support for daycare chains; state-licensing compliance reports; HIPAA Business-Associate posture for the elder-care side; one-line provisioning of the Pi.
The features that don't exist today: a native iOS app (in progress — Maya is on it), the white-label enterprise tier, full ASL/Spanish UI, and a hundred small things customer feedback will surface that we haven't thought of yet. We will build those in front of you.
What we're asking
We have zero paying customers today. By design. We are pre-revenue on purpose, because we'd rather have five founding partners who help us build the right thing than fifty customers who churn quietly.
The five founding-partner slots come with the founder's direct phone number, a rate locked at your signing base — $99/month for childcare — for as long as you're a founding partner, a Pi 5 Setup Kit for $299 one-time shipped to your door, and a one-business-day response on anything that's broken. If TinyGuard works for your facility the way it works for ours, you'll save more in the first month than the software costs. If it doesn't, you can cancel anytime — no lock-in, no hard feelings, and a thank-you for trying.
Two months in, this is what TinyGuard looks like. Two years from now, who knows. But the cameras will still be in our living room. That part doesn't change.
— Del, founder
With Laura, who will never read this because she's busy.