Every feature in CoPa.
One family plan. No tier-locked features, no upsells inside the app. Below: every capability in the order it shows up in your week.
Schedule and custody.
Custody calendar with templates
Set up your schedule in under a minute. Built-in templates for the most common rotations — 2-2-5-5, 3-4-4-3, alternating weeks, every weekend, every other weekend with midweek visit. Build a custom pattern if none of the templates fit. Both parents see the same calendar, color-coded by household, with custody days, transfer times, and exchange locations.
Holiday and exception overrides
Holidays and special days sit on a separate layer from your regular rotation. Override Thanksgiving in even years, Christmas Eve in odd years, your kid's birthday for whoever has the day. Past holidays remain on the record so there's no question later about who had the day.
Schedule change requests with audit trail
Either parent can propose a swap. The other approves, denies, or counter-proposes — with an optional note. Approved swaps update the calendar automatically. Every action is appended to an audit log that cannot be overwritten or backdated. The audit log exports as part of any record export.
Right of First Refusal
If your parenting plan includes a Right of First Refusal clause, CoPa handles the workflow. When a parent can't cover their custody time (work travel, illness), they offer those hours to the other parent first, with a deadline. The other parent accepts or declines. The full notification trail is part of the record.
Calendar sync to Google, Apple, Outlook
CoPa is the first co-parenting app with read-only iCal sync. Subscribe your custody schedule directly into the calendar app you already use, alongside your work meetings and your kid's school events. One-tap setup, no extra login. Choose to sync your full schedule or just the transfer events. Updates push automatically.
This matters because the alternative — keeping your custody schedule in one app and the rest of your life in another — is friction you live with every day. We removed it.
Communication.
Structured messaging
Messages are scoped to topics — schedule, expenses, school, medical, general — instead of dumped into one long thread. When a topic comes up in court, you don't scroll through six months of unrelated chat. You open the schedule thread.
Every message is timestamped at the server. Once sent, messages cannot be edited or deleted. This is intentional and non-negotiable: the record is the record.
Calm Reading
Calm Reading is an AI feature that rewrites incoming messages into neutral, factual language. It strips emotional charge while preserving every date, amount, and specific request the sender made.
It runs on the receiver's side only. The sender's message is never altered, and the sender doesn't know whether their co-parent has it enabled. The legal record is always the original. The calm version is shown for convenience, cached briefly, and never included in any export. You can tap once to see the original at any time. It's opt-in — you turn it on in Settings, and you can turn it off any time.
Calm Reading doesn't soften your co-parent or game the conversation. It gives you a way to read the message without absorbing the emotional charge, so you can respond from somewhere calmer.
SMS Relay
SMS Relay is for the case where your co-parent won't install the app. We assign you a CoPa-issued phone number. Your co-parent texts that number from their regular phone. CoPa receives the SMS, captures it to your shared record exactly as sent, and forwards it to your CoPa app as an in-app message. When you reply through CoPa, your reply goes out as SMS from the CoPa number to your co-parent's phone.
Your co-parent never installs anything. They text the way they always have. Every message, in both directions, lands on the same court-ready record as if both of you had been using the app from the start.
SMS Relay is $7/month per relayed parent. The relayed number is yours for as long as the subscription is active. After cancellation, the number is quarantined for 180 days before being recycled, given the sensitivity of what may have flowed through it.
Bridge Notes
A short structured note from the parent doing dropoff, sent before pickup. Captures what the receiving parent will want to know in the next 12 hours: how the kid slept, mood, anything new with food or health, school items going home in the backpack.
The receiving parent sees it as a notification. The full history exports as a per-child timeline. No other co-parenting app does this. We built it because the curb conversation at handoff is the worst part of co-parenting, and a written note 30 minutes ahead solves most of it.
Records and evidence.
Immutable message history
Once a message is sent, it's part of the record. No editing. No deleting. No "I didn't mean to send that." This is true for both of you.
Exportable, formatted records
Generate a PDF of any thread, date range, or category in two taps. Exports include sender, recipient, server timestamp, and content, formatted for legal use. Cryptographic verification metadata is included on every export so a reviewing attorney or judge can confirm the file hasn't been altered after generation.
Audit trails on schedule changes and approvals
Every schedule change request — proposed, approved, denied, expired — is logged with timestamp and actor. The audit trail is part of the record export and cannot be edited.
Private journal
A personal log only you can see. Your co-parent has no access and no notification that it exists. Tag entries (incident, behavior, medical, custody) and export to PDF for your attorney or therapist. The share extension lets you push a screenshot, photo, or document from any app on your phone directly into a journal entry, timestamped at capture.
The journal exists because some things you need to document — a phone call you weren't recorded for, a comment your kid made, a screenshot of your co-parent's social media — don't belong in a shared message thread. They belong in a private log that's still timestamped and exportable.
Money.
Expense ledger
Log shared costs, attach receipts, set custom splits (not just 50/50), and track a running balance. Categories cover medical, school, extracurriculars, daycare, clothing, and custom buckets. The other parent gets a notification, can dispute or approve, and the back-and-forth lives on the same audit trail as everything else.
Child support ledger
Tracked separately from shared expenses, since child support is its own legal category and shouldn't get mixed in with the orthodontist bill. Monthly amount, payment method, paid/missed status, and full history.
What CoPa doesn't do (yet)
We don't process payments. The expense ledger is for logging and dispute resolution. You handle the actual money through your bank, Venmo, or whatever you already use. In-app payments are on the roadmap for v2 — we wanted to ship the logging side first because it's where most of the friction actually lives.
Documents and sharing.
Document vault
Upload your parenting agreement, school enrollment forms, medical records, insurance cards, custody orders. Both parents can access the vault. Files are stored encrypted, accessible via signed time-limited links. Upload size limits are generous; the family plan includes 5 GB.
Universal share extension (iOS + Android)
Share a screenshot, photo, or document from any app on your phone. CoPa's share extension is in the share sheet alongside Mail, Messages, and AirDrop. Tap it, choose "private journal" or "document vault," and the file is captured to a permanent, timestamped entry. Useful for grabbing texts, social media posts, or app screenshots that you need to preserve.
For attorneys, mediators, and parenting coordinators.
CoPa includes free portal access for the legal and family professionals working with both parents. We don't charge for the third-party seat — recommending CoPa to your client shouldn't add to your firm's software costs, and your access shouldn't depend on which client invited you.
See the attorney portal in detail →What's not in CoPa.
A short list of things we left out on purpose.
No advertising. Not now, not later.
Your co-parenting communication is not training data, not ad inventory, and not for sale.
No social feed.
CoPa is for you and your co-parent, not for performance.
No gamification.
No streaks. No badges. Co-parenting is not a game; we won't pretend it is.
No public reviews of co-parents.
A few competitors have toyed with peer-rating systems. We won't.