For families living apart. See your parents’ sky and local time, and what they chose to share today. Light a lamp to say “thinking of you”. They answer by voice in their own language; Nearer writes it down and keeps it. No tracking, no feed, free.

Hi Product Hunt, I’m Sanjeev.

My parents live far from me. Our family group chat is where I ask “all okay?” and get “all fine”. Every so often a voice note from Maa scrolls away and is lost.

Nearer is my answer. It opens on a window into their home: their real sky, their time, the weather, and anything they chose to share today (“tea, 7:10 AM”).

Then there are three small things:

🪔 The lamp. One tap, and it glows on their screen: “Arjun is thinking of you.” It isn’t a check-in and nobody is asked to reply.
🚪 An open door. Maa opens her door for chai and you join with audio. Nothing starts until you tap.
🎙️ Voice, kept. Parents talk the way they talk, in any of 55 languages. Recipes, stories and blessings get written down, translated for the grandchildren and kept in the family’s book.

What it won’t do: track location, infer whether someone is “okay” from silence, show streaks or likes, or run a feed. Parents should feel needed, not watched.

It’s free, and you can try a demo family without signing up. It runs on Meta’s Muse models. I built it solo during the Meta AI hackathon.

I’d really like to hear from anyone whose parents live far away: what would make you open this every day?

lovely idea, congrats!! if a parent records a voice note in Russian and the grandkids only read English, does Nearer translate it automatically or does someone have to tap translate each time?

@igorblink Thanks Igor! It’s automatic. Each person sets their language once in Settings. When a parent records in Russian, the note is transcribed and the grandkids see the words in English as it plays. The original Russian transcript is one tap away, and the voice itself is never changed, so they still hear the parent’s own voice.