KinSource

KinSource is a free step-by-step plan for Houston families moving or caring for an aging or senior parent. We know the help exists, but no-one tells you the order or how to navigate the change.

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Inspiration

Harbor Lane is a Houston senior transition company. Families kept telling us the same thing: the help exists, but nobody tells you the order or gives you a plan that you can use. When your loved one experiences a displacement and a transition is necessary, it's often times sudden and families are not prepared.

When Mom falls or Dad can't manage the stairs, most families start with a search box. They find a mover here, a hauler there, and a contractor from a Facebook group, and they make six-figure decisions about a parent's safety in the margins of a full-time job, often from another city. Harris County has about 615,700 adults over 65, and every hurricane season turns planned moves into emergency ones overnight.

We came to Houston Hackathon 2026 as the challenge owner for "Helping Families Manage Senior Parents' Re-Housing." We wanted to build the thing families asked us for: not another list of resources, but the order to use them in.

What it does

KinSource is a free, plain-language web tool for Houston families moving or caring for an aging parent.

  • Choose your lane. Parent, daughter, son, spouse, relative or friend, or a professional like a discharge planner. The wording changes with the lane ("you" for the parent, "your parent" for everyone else).
  • Answer a few questions. What's happening (a planned move, a hospital stay or fall, a storm, or just exploring), where the parent is going next, what happens to the house, how soon, and a few questions specific to the lane.
  • Get a plan in the right order. 12 to 26 steps in five phases, each with a typical Houston cost range or "Free," and who to call. Every plan starts with free public help, the Aging & Disability Resource Center and 2-1-1, before any paid step. The plan opens with a short "Before you start" guide written for that exact situation, one of more than 9,000 versions.
  • Take it with you. A large-type PDF with a "Who to call" page for parents who aren't online, and a plain-text version to share with siblings.
  • Free help, always open. 18 public and nonprofit Harris County resources, never behind a login.
  • Learn. Four short guides: what it costs in Houston, starting the conversation, helping from out of town, and hurricane season.
  • The KinSource Directory. Private providers checked by hand against six published standards, free with an account. Every listing shows its verification status (verified, partially verified, or unverified) and the date that status last changed, so families know exactly how far our checks have got.
  • A gap map. Who covers each part of a senior transition in Harris County, and the part no one covers: the order.

How we built it

  • Plan logic first. We started with a prototype built by a volunteer developer and mentor at the hackathon, and rebuilt its rules as one TypeScript file: lanes, questions, every step, cost ranges and the plan builder. The site, the PDF and the shared text all read from that one file, so a number can't say one thing on screen and another on paper.
  • Design was done in Claude Design, and the build in Lovable. We designed the pages as artboards (home, plan, free help, directory, learn, about, and the printable plan), then built the site in Lovable with Lovable Cloud (Supabase) for accounts, saved plans and the directory, synced to GitHub. Every prompt starts with a target line so nothing lands in the wrong project.
  • Costs from sources, not guesses. On Saturday we checked all 29 cost lines against 88 named Houston sources across five research tracks (senior living, in-home care, moving, legal and real estate, home modification). 15 held and 14 changed, including rent, estate sale commissions, storage and the cost of carrying an empty house. Each line now has a dated source and a confidence rating.
  • A directory with honest statuses. We researched 54 Houston providers across nine categories against our six standards. Since a weekend isn't long enough to confirm licenses and insurance by phone, every listing launches as partially verified or unverified, with a plain instruction to families about what to check first.
  • Tested before anything went live. We rebuilt all 350,400 possible plans after every change and checked each for errors, missing text and wording that doesn't match the family's answers.
  • AI-assisted, team-reviewed. We used Claude for research, drafting and code, and reviewed every number and every sentence before it shipped.

Challenges we ran into

  • Staying neutral while running a company in the same field. Harbor Lane does senior moves. So KinSource has its own name, publishes its fairness rules, lists free help first, takes no referral fees, and lists Harbor Lane only if it meets the same six standards, labeled as the steward. Today Harbor Lane doesn't meet all six, so it isn't listed.
  • Vetting takes longer than a weekend. The state lookups we needed (Texas HHS, TxDMV, the State Bar, TREC) can't be run from a research tool, and insurance certificates have to be requested. Rather than pretend, we built the three-status system and put the date on every listing.
  • Cost data hides. The one large independent survey publishes Houston figures only behind a paid tool, and most Houston senior move managers, estate sale companies and care managers don't publish prices at all. We used Texas medians where we had to and said so.
  • Two teams, two builds. A teammate built a parallel version with ideas we liked: a locked Directory link in the nav that explains why to create an account, simple guide cards, and a neutrality-first About page. We merged the best of both into one site.
  • Small things that matter to older adults. 19px minimum body text, 44px tap targets, phone numbers as copyable text, and a PDF that makes sense printed.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • A working site a family can use today, not a mockup.
  • Every cost range traceable to a dated Houston source, with a public note on how we set them.
  • A "Before you start" guide that changes with the situation: after a storm it says safety first, then paperwork, then the move; after a fall it says the discharge date sets the pace.
  • A directory that tells the truth about what's been checked, and a legend for it on the About page.
  • Free public help first on every plan, every time.

What we learned

  • Families don't need more information. They need the order, they value a plan they can work against especially in these scenarios. Almost every design decision got easier once we held to that.
  • Honesty is a feature. "Unverified, check first" builds more trust than a badge nobody can explain.
  • One source of truth saves a weekend. Keeping every cost and every word in data files meant a price change took one edit and zero layout risk.
  • The people carrying this are adult children coordinating from work or another city. Every screen has to work on a phone, on a lunch break.

What's next for KinSource

  • Verify the first providers. Phone-confirm licenses, insurance and pricing for the 16 partially verified listings, and move the first ones to verified.
  • Let providers share real prices. Every listed provider publishes a typical price range, so over time KinSource replaces national estimates with real Houston numbers.
  • Spanish and Vietnamese versions, and a text-message version of the plan.
  • Partners. Hospital discharge planners, the Area Agency on Aging and 2-1-1, so a family leaves the hospital with a plan in hand.
  • Keep it current. Care costs are rising 5 to 7% a year while Houston rents are also increasing, so we'll check the two halves of the plan on their own schedules.

VIEW OUR PITCH DECK: Link

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