Why I built BackpackBuddy

I'm Stan, a dad in Maryland. I built BackpackBuddy after finding out about pajama day on Friday morning, for the third time. My kids' teachers were emailing me every week, and I was missing half of them. Now BackpackBuddy reads them for me, and far fewer things slip through.

That's the short version. The longer one is that none of it was a system problem I could fix by trying harder. The homework email came in on Monday, under eleven other emails. The permission slip was a PDF attached to a newsletter. Picture day was one line in a paragraph about the book fair. By Thursday it was all still technically in my inbox and completely out of my head.

What I actually wanted

I didn't want another app to check. I already had a calendar, and my family already used it. I wanted the school stuff to just be in it, without me forwarding anything or copying dates across by hand.

So that's what BackpackBuddy does. You connect Gmail once and say which teacher addresses to watch. Every evening it reads only those messages, pulls out the homework, events and deadlines, writes them onto your existing Google Calendar (a separate calendar per child), and emails you one digest of what's coming. You don't change how you use email.

What it doesn't do

• It isn't a school product. There's nothing to roll out, nothing for your school to sign, and no reason your teachers ever need to know it exists. It works with whatever they already send.
• It only reads Gmail. If your school mail lands somewhere else, this won't help you yet.
• It isn't perfect, and I won't pretend otherwise. Teachers write in every format there is. BackpackBuddy catches most of it and far fewer things slip through, but you should still keep half an eye on the digest. Our terms say the same thing, in less friendly language.

What happens to your email

This is the part I'd want to know if I were you. BackpackBuddy reads only messages from the teacher addresses you list. It extracts the homework and event details, writes those to your calendar, and then discards the message body. We don't keep your email, we don't sell anything, and there are no ads. Google reviewed and verified the app for this access in September 2026, and the codebase passed a CASA / OWASP ASVS security audit. The full detail is in the privacy policy.

Who's behind it

BackpackBuddy, LLC is a Maryland company, and right now it's me. When you email support, I'm the one who answers. If something's broken or the extraction missed a thing it should have caught, tell me at [email protected] and I'll look at it myself.