Familjegaraget, my family-logistics app, started as an idea at the kitchen table and ended up as an app submitted to the App Store. Here's the whole journey — with every tool and service at every step — written for you who isn't technical but wonders whether you could do the same. Spoiler: you can.
I've worked on IT projects for over 20 years — but as a project manager, not a developer. I've never been able to code. And yet I've built Familjegaraget: a working family app with logins, a points system for chores, bookings for the family's shared things and real-time updates between family members' phones. Built on evenings and weekends, published on the web and submitted to Apple's App Store.
This isn't an article about how amazing AI is. It's a manual. I walk through exactly which tools I used, in what order, what they cost and what you need to know (very little). If you can write an email and describe what you want, you've got the background this takes.
It all started in an ordinary chat. I described our family problem: chores nobody wanted to do, things that kept getting double-booked, nagging about screen time. I asked the AI to help me think: What should an app like this be able to do? What's the smallest possible version? What's hard and what's easy?
This step matters more than it sounds. Don't skip it. An hour of good conversation here saves ten hours later. Ask the AI to play devil's advocate: "What have I missed? What's going to get messy?"
The next step is to download Cursor — a program that looks like a code editor (because it is one), but with one crucial difference: it has a built-in AI that writes the code for you. You type what you want into a chat box, in plain language, and the AI creates and edits the files in your project.
Don't let the technical-looking interface put you off. You'll basically only use two things: the chat box and the button that previews your app. The code scrolling past is something you never need to understand — but it's still fascinating to watch it take shape.
Familjegaraget is built with something called Next.js — a framework for modern web apps. You don't need to understand it. It's enough to know that the AI chose it for me and that it's the same technology real companies use. Your job isn't to know the tech — it's to be the client: describe, test, give feedback.
My way of working quickly became a rhythm: ask for one thing at a time ("now I want the kids to be able to tick off a chore and earn points"), look at the result in the preview, and describe what to change ("the button's too small, and the points should show straight away without reloading the page"). Just like giving feedback to a consultant — except the consultant replies in three seconds.
When something broke (and it does) I pasted the error message into the chat and wrote "this happened, fix it". That solved 95 percent of all problems. The remaining 5 percent got solved by asking the AI to "start over with a different solution to this problem".
An app without a database forgets everything when you close it. For the family's chores, points and bookings to be saved — and for every family member to log in with their own account — I needed a database service. I used Supabase.
It sounds advanced but was surprisingly simple: create a free account on their website, copy two long keys (like passwords for the app) and paste them where the AI tells you. Then the AI handles the rest: it creates the tables, wires up the login and even builds the real-time feature that means when a child ticks off a chore, the parent's screen updates straight away.
As long as the app only lives on your computer, no one else can use it. Publishing was handled by Vercel — a service that takes your code and puts it out on the internet, automatically, every time you make a change. The AI in Cursor guided me through the whole setup.
I also bought the domain familjegaraget.se from Loopia, a Swedish domain provider, and pointed it at Vercel. That too with the AI as my pilot: I wrote "I've bought a domain on Loopia, how do I connect it?" and got a step-by-step list to follow.
When someone creates an account or forgets their password, the app needs to be able to send email. For that I used Resend — a service built precisely so apps can send email. I asked the AI to connect Resend with Supabase and write all the email templates in Swedish, in the app's visual style. An evening's work, done.
This step needs no new tool, but it's the most important of all: let real people use the app. We started with our own family, then pilot families. Every "this is odd" and "why did my booking disappear?" became an item on a fix-list that I worked through in Cursor, exactly as in step 3.
My experience after 20 years in IT projects holds here too: the bugs you find yourself are half of them. Users find the rest. Plan for it — it's normal, not a failure.
This got a notch more technical — but still entirely doable with the AI as a guide. A web app can be packaged into a "real" app with a tool called Capacitor. Put simply, Capacitor builds a thin shell around your web app so it can be installed from the App Store like any other app.
To build iOS apps you need two more things: a Mac (Apple's own requirement — it doesn't work on Windows) and the Xcode program, which is free and downloads from the Mac App Store. The AI wrote all the Capacitor settings for me; my job was to click the right buttons in Xcode as instructed and test the app — first in a simulated iPhone on the computer screen, then on my actual phone.
Apple doesn't let just anything into the App Store, and there's a checklist to work through. No single item is hard, but there are a lot of them. Here's what I did — with AI help on every one:
App icon. The icon is needed in a whole set of sizes. The AI generated the entire pack from a single original image.
Privacy policy and support page. Apple requires public web pages for both. The AI wrote them in Swedish, in the app's visual profile, and they now live on familjegaraget.se.
App Store Connect. Apple's portal where the app's "store page" is filled in: description, keywords, screenshots, age rating and so-called Privacy Labels — a declaration of what data the app handles. I wrote the description texts together with the AI and filled in the declaration with the AI as a sounding board for every question.
The last step: in Xcode you choose Product → Archive, which packages the finished app, and then Distribute App, which uploads it to App Store Connect. There you pick your build, attach a demo account so Apple's reviewers can log in and test, write a few lines to the reviewer — and press the button.
Then you wait. Apple reviews every app manually, usually within a few days. Sometimes the app goes through straight away, sometimes you get a note to fix and resubmit. It's part of the process, not a verdict on you.
Adding it up: Claude and Cursor at about SEK 200/month each while you're building actively, Apple's developer membership at 99 USD/year, a domain for a few hundred kronor a year. Supabase, Vercel, Resend and Capacitor get by on their free tiers for a project this size. All told it lands around SEK 1,500 a year in fixed costs, plus the AI subscriptions for the months you build.
What it does take is something other than money and technical know-how: clarity. The ability to describe what you want, test carefully and give concrete feedback. Those are, perhaps not that surprisingly, the same abilities that make a good client in any IT project. The difference is that your "supplier" now replies in seconds, never gets grumpy about changes and costs about a thousand kronor a month.
Curious about the tools mentioned in the guide? I've written a fly-over of the whole AI-tools landscape in 2026. And you'll find the result of all this at familjegaraget.se.
* Fixed annual costs: Apple Developer Program and domain. AI subscriptions come on top for the months you build actively. Prices and free tiers apply as of July 2026 and may change.
I regularly share what I build, test and learn — both here and on LinkedIn.
