Who can see the pantry? A guide to household permissions
The NestBoard team · 2026-06-18
The short answer
When you add someone to your household, they can see almost everything. Pantry items, medication bottles, meal plans, savings goals—these are shared spaces, not personal ones. We built it this way because a household operates on shared information.
The exceptions are narrow and deliberate. Kid and guest accounts are kept out of billing, household settings, member management, and Robin. Any single event can be marked adults-only, which hides it from kids and from the wall display. A household PIN can sit in front of the wish list and the settings screen. But the baseline assumption is transparency.
Why shared by default
We've watched families struggle with apps that treat every piece of information like a secret. One parent adds milk to the shopping list, another doesn't see it, someone buys duplicates. A grandparent visiting for the week can't check if the kids have taken their vitamins because they're locked out of the meds module.
Friction compounds. So we start from the opposite direction: if it's in the household, it's visible to the household.
That includes the pantry. Everyone can see what's stocked, what's expiring soon, and what's running low. It also means anyone can add or remove items. If your teenager finishes the oat milk, they can mark it gone. If your partner finds a forgotten jar of tahini in the back of the cupboard, they can log it.
What kids see
Kid accounts see the pantry, the meal plan, and their own chores. They can check what's for dinner, browse recipes you've saved, and mark off tasks when they're done.
What they can't reach is the money and the machinery: billing, the household's settings, adding or removing members, and Robin, which is adults only. Everything else, calendar events that aren't marked adults-only, shared shopping lists, the pantry, the meal plan, is visible.
Why kid accounts work differently goes deeper into the reasoning, but the principle is consistency. Kids are part of the household. They see what the household is doing.
Medications are a little different
Meds work on a bottle model, not a person model. If you add a vitamin D bottle to the household, everyone who takes vitamin D can log doses from that same bottle. It's shared inventory, which means it's visible to everyone in the household.
We wrote about this shift in Shared bottles, shared meds: why we changed how supplements work. The upshot is that privacy lives at the household level, not the medication level. If someone's in your NestBoard household, they can see the med list.
When you want more control
There are two tools for limiting what's on screen. Settings, then Modules hides a whole section from everyone in the household, on every device. And a household PIN puts Wish Lists and Settings and Billing behind a code, so a kid on a tablet the family is already signed in to can't wander into them.
Kiosk mode is a different thing, and worth not confusing with those. Marking one device as a kiosk makes it behave like a wall display: the dashboard full screen, a photo slideshow when nobody is around, dimming at night. It doesn't hide pages. What it does do, because it's a shared screen anyone can walk up to, is filter every adults-only event off it entirely. Your own phone and laptop are untouched.
There is exactly one per-item control, and it's deliberately the only one: an event can be marked adults-only. Surprise parties and the conversation you're not having in front of the kids get somewhere to live, and nothing else does. We don't offer per-item toggles on the pantry, the lists, or the meal plan, and we probably never will. That kind of granularity makes sense for work software. It doesn't make sense for a household, where the question is usually "Does everyone know we're out of bread?" not "Who is authorized to know about the bread?"
The underlying idea
A household isn't a hierarchy. It's a group of people who need to coordinate around the same milk, the same calendar, the same front door. Shared visibility is the tool that makes coordination possible.
If you add someone to your NestBoard household, you're saying: this person is part of the operation. They can see what we have, what we need, and what we're planning. That's not a bug. It's the point.