Question 1

What is CoParent.Help?

Accepted Answer

CoParent.Help is a documentation and communication platform built for the realities of co-parenting after separation. Every message, calendar change, payment, journal entry, recorded call, and document upload is time-stamped at creation and signed with a SHA-256 hash, producing a tamper-evident record that exports cleanly into a court-ready PDF. It is a daily coordination tool that also serves as a long-term system of record.

Question 2

Who is CoParent.Help for?

Accepted Answer

Three overlapping audiences. (1) Co-parents who want a single neutral place to communicate, share a calendar, and track shared expenses — peacefully, today. (2) Co-parents anticipating or living through a custody dispute who need a verifiable record of what has actually happened. (3) The professionals who serve those families: family-law attorneys, mediators, custody evaluators, parenting coordinators, and judges who review the resulting records.

Question 3

Do both parents need to join?

Accepted Answer

No. You can use CoParent.Help solo to document your own communication attempts, log expenses, keep a private journal, and store documents. If your co-parent does not join, your unilateral record still has value — it shows what you proposed, what you paid, what you asked for, and when. Shared features (the joint calendar, accountable payments, secure messaging) unlock automatically when both parents are connected.

Question 4

How do I invite my co-parent?

Accepted Answer

From the dashboard go to Settings → Invite Co-Parent and enter their email. They receive an email invitation; once accepted, the connection links your accounts but each parent keeps their own login, subscription tier, and private journal. Either of you can be on Standard while the other is on Premium — the shared data lives on the connection, not the subscription.

Question 5

What happens if my co-parent refuses to join?

Accepted Answer

Your account still records everything you do — messages you attempted to send through the platform, expenses you submitted, calendar events you created. Those unilateral attempts are themselves probative: a court can see who tried to communicate through a neutral channel and who declined. We have parents who use the platform alone for years before the other parent joins, and that solo record still becomes a Court-Ready Report.

Question 6

How long does setup take?

Accepted Answer

Signup is under two minutes — email, password, name. Adding a child takes about 30 seconds. Inviting a co-parent takes about 60 seconds. You can start documenting immediately; you do not need to onboard your co-parent first.

Question 7

Is CoParent.Help a messaging app?

Accepted Answer

CoParent.Help includes secure messaging, but it is fundamentally a record-keeping platform. The messaging surface is structured to be evidence-quality: messages are append-only (cannot be edited after send), each carries a send/delivery/read timestamp, and the platform offers AI tone suggestions before send to help reduce conflict language. It is not designed to replace iMessage or WhatsApp for friends — it is designed for the one relationship where you want every word preserved.

Question 8

Can messages be deleted or edited?

Accepted Answer

No. The sender may retract a message — this leaves a permanent retraction record visible to both parties (the original content is preserved internally; the retraction itself becomes part of the record). Neither party can hard-delete a message. This is intentional: the business-records-exception foundation of admissibility requires records that cannot be edited or deleted after creation.

Question 9

Are records time-stamped?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Every record — messages, calendar events, payments, journal entries, documents, calls, goals — is time-stamped to the second at the moment of creation in our system. Timestamps are server-side, not user-controlled, and cannot be back-dated. The timestamp is part of what gets hashed into a Court-Ready Report.

Question 10

Can I upload documents or files?

Accepted Answer

Yes. The Document Vault stores custody agreements, court orders, medical records, school transcripts, immunization cards, lawyer correspondence, and any other relevant files. Vault storage is 5 GB on Standard and 25 GB on Premium. Documents are stored on encrypted infrastructure (encryption at rest provided by our hosting provider) and versioned (every upload preserves the prior version), and each file is fingerprinted with a SHA-256 hash at upload so later tampering is detectable.

Question 11

How does the shared calendar handle disputes?

Accepted Answer

Schedule changes are not silent. When one parent proposes a change, the other receives a request with explicit accept / reject / propose-new-time options. Every change request, response, and counter-proposal is logged with timestamps. Over months, the pattern (last-minute changes, repeated cancellations, refused approvals) becomes a piece of evidence in its own right — visible in the calendar timeline export.

Question 12

What is Accountable Calling?

Accepted Answer

Phone calls placed through the CoParent.Help dialer route through the platform. Each call carries sender, recipient, timestamp, and duration in your record. On Premium, calls are recorded with a recording notice shown to both participants; completed recordings are fingerprinted with a SHA-256 hash and referenced in exportable evidence. Recording laws vary by state, and many states require every participant’s consent — ask your attorney about the rules in your jurisdiction. Standard includes 120 voice minutes per month, Premium includes 600.

Question 13

What's actually inside a Court-Ready Report?

Accepted Answer

A professionally formatted PDF covering seven evidence categories: messages, calendar events + changes, expenses + payments, personal journal entries (only if the journal owner opts them in), call logs with recording references, document vault uploads, and shared goal contributions. The cover page carries the SHA-256 hash, a QR code linking to the public verifier, and the records custodian declaration block. Every interior page footer carries the hash.

Question 14

Why is the SHA-256 hash important?

Accepted Answer

A SHA-256 hash is a cryptographic fingerprint of the exact contents of the report — change one character anywhere and the fingerprint changes completely. We compute the hash at generation time and publish it to an append-only verification ledger at coparent.help/verify. Anyone holding the PDF — opposing counsel, mediator, judge, court clerk — can compute its hash themselves and confirm it matches the ledger. This is what makes the document self-authenticating; we cannot fake it after the fact, and we cannot "un-publish" a hash once it is recorded.

Question 15

Are CoParent.Help records admissible in court?

Accepted Answer

Admissibility is decided by your specific judge under the applicable rules of evidence — we do not claim guaranteed admissibility. That said, our records are structured to meet the foundation of Federal Rule of Evidence 803(6), the business-records exception to hearsay, recognized in every U.S. state. Records are made at or near the time of events, by users with knowledge, in the regular course of using the platform — and accompanied by a records custodian declaration under FRE 902(11) / 902(13) that makes them self-authenticating without live testimony.

Question 16

What is a records custodian declaration?

Accepted Answer

A one-click PDF that accompanies every Court-Ready export. It is a sworn declaration under penalty of perjury, in the FRE 902(11) / 902(13) form, by an authorized custodian of records of the company that operates CoParent.Help. The declaration references the specific export's hash, verification URL, row count, and date range. Your client prints it, signs it before a notary where required, and files the signed copy with the report. The declaration ties uniquely to one hash — it cannot be reused against a different export.

Question 17

Can opposing counsel verify a Court-Ready PDF independently?

Accepted Answer

Yes — that is the entire point of the published-hash design. Opposing counsel can either scan the QR code on the cover page or visit coparent.help/verify directly, type in the hash, and confirm the document matches what we recorded at generation time. If the hashes match, the document is unaltered. If they do not match, the document has been edited. The verification path requires no CoParent.Help account and no platform cooperation.

Question 18

What about chain of custody for litigation?

Accepted Answer

Premium tier users can flip a Litigation Hold switch on their account when a case is active. This writes a dated hold record (with case number and jurisdiction) to the ledger. The hold state is hashed into every subsequent export, making the preservation claim tamper-evident — it is part of the record, not a UI annotation that could be challenged.

Question 19

Can records be back-dated or selectively deleted?

Accepted Answer

No. Timestamps are server-set at creation, not user-controlled. Once a message, payment, or other entry exists in the platform, no user (including us as operators) can edit its content or change its timestamp. Selective deletion is similarly prevented. This property is what makes the platform a reliable contemporaneous-record system.

Question 20

Are recorded calls admissible?

Accepted Answer

Call recording requires legal consent appropriate to your jurisdiction. The platform supports recorded calls on Premium where the user has the legal right to record. Recordings carry the same hash verification as other records and are referenced by hash in exports. Whether a specific recording is admissible is a question for your attorney; the platform provides the verifiable chain of custody and metadata that a court would expect for any admitted audio evidence.

Question 21

Will I need to bring a CoParent.Help witness to court?

Accepted Answer

Most state-court equivalents of FRE 902(11) allow business records to be self-authenticated by a custodian declaration without live testimony. The platform provides that declaration on every export. Whether live testimony is required is a decision for the court — but the structural foundation of the export is designed specifically to avoid that requirement in the typical case.

Question 22

How secure is my data?

Accepted Answer

All data is encrypted in transit using TLS 1.3 and stored on encrypted infrastructure (encryption at rest provided by our hosting provider). Passwords are hashed with a modern, salted password-hashing algorithm; we never store them in plain text. The hosting infrastructure is HIPAA-grade with continuous backups, intrusion detection, and audit logging on every sensitive action (sign-in, exports, account changes, password changes). Sessions are protected against CSRF and follow secure-cookie standards.

Question 23

Is CoParent.Help HIPAA compliant?

Accepted Answer

CoParent.Help is not a covered entity under HIPAA — we do not provide healthcare services, and we are not a healthcare provider. We use HIPAA-grade infrastructure because the privacy and integrity standards required for medical data also map well to the sensitivity of co-parenting data. If you upload medical records to the Document Vault, they are encrypted with the same protections as everything else on the platform.

Question 24

Will my data ever be sold or shared with third parties?

Accepted Answer

No. We will never sell, lease, or share your data with advertisers, data brokers, AI training providers, or other third parties. This is contractually committed in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service. Co-parenting data is among the most sensitive personal information you have, and we treat it that way.

Question 25

Can my co-parent see my Personal Journal?

Accepted Answer

No. Personal Journal entries are private to you and never shared with your co-parent, regardless of plan. The only way a journal entry ever leaves your account is if you, the journal owner, explicitly opt those specific entries into a Court-Ready export. The platform does not let your co-parent — or anyone else — view your journal contents.

Question 26

How do you handle subpoenas and legal process?

Accepted Answer

We comply with valid legal process. If we receive a subpoena, search warrant, or court order requiring us to produce user records, we follow the law of the jurisdiction issuing the process. Where the law permits, we notify the affected user so they (and their attorney) can challenge the request before we produce records. Our Privacy Policy details this process.

Question 27

Do you use two-factor authentication?

Accepted Answer

Two-factor authentication via TOTP (compatible with Google Authenticator, 1Password, Authy, and other standard apps) is available as an opt-in security feature. Once enabled, you must provide a one-time code from your authenticator app at sign-in. Backup codes are issued at setup in case you lose access to your authenticator. We strongly recommend enabling 2FA for any account holding records that may become court evidence.

Question 28

What happens during a session timeout?

Accepted Answer

Inactive sessions warn at 14 minutes and force sign-out at 15 minutes — a standard idle-timeout pattern used by banking and healthcare apps. This protects you if you walk away from a shared computer. Activity (mouse movement, keystrokes, scroll) resets the timer. Active work on the platform never times out mid-task.

Question 29

How much does CoParent.Help cost?

Accepted Answer

Every account starts with a 10-day free trial of Premium — no credit card required. After that there are four paid subscription tiers. Standard is $14.99/month ($9.99/month on annual) and includes 1-year retention, unlimited PDF exports, 5 GB vault, and 120 voice minutes. Premium is $24.99/month ($19.99/month on annual) and unlocks unlimited retention, recorded calls, Personal Journal, AI-summarized timelines, and 600 voice minutes. Court Evidence ($79/month) adds Records Custodian Declaration tools and professional-grade exports for disputes and mediation. Litigation Hold Pro ($149/month) is built for active legal disputes, adding Legal Hold Mode, enhanced evidence bundles, and multi-period dispute timelines.

Question 30

Do both parents need to pay?

Accepted Answer

No. Each parent has their own account and chooses their own subscription independently. One parent on Standard and the other on Premium is a common configuration. The shared data (joint calendar, accountable payments, shared messaging) is linked to your connection, not to your subscription tier — so the relationship between parents works across any plan combination.

Question 31

Can I change my plan later?

Accepted Answer

Yes — upgrade or downgrade at any time. Changes take effect immediately and we automatically prorate the billing difference. Your records, messages, and history travel with you on every plan change. Downgrading to a lower tier reduces retention going forward but does not delete existing records that were created under a higher plan.

Question 32

What happens if I cancel my subscription?

Accepted Answer

Your full account data is retained for 90 days after cancellation. During the 90-day window, the live app pauses but the underlying records are preserved — renewing within 90 days restores everything instantly. After 90 days, records may be permanently deleted and cannot be recovered. If you have an active legal case, generate and download a Court-Ready PDF before cancellation. The PDF you download is yours forever, independent of your subscription.

Question 33

If I renew before 90 days, will my data still be there?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Renewing within the 90-day post-cancellation window restores access to every record you had at cancellation time. No data is lost in that window.

Question 34

Can I export my records?

Accepted Answer

Yes. Court-Ready Reports are the comprehensive export — available on every paid plan. Beyond that, any user can request a complete GDPR Article 20 data export — a full JSON copy of everything we store about you — by emailing smithappsupport@gmail.com. Exports are prepared and delivered to your account email, typically within 3 business days.

Question 35

Do you offer refunds?

Accepted Answer

New paid subscriptions can be refunded within 14 days of the initial payment if you have not generated a Court-Ready Report. Subscription renewals are refundable within 7 days if no platform activity occurred since the renewal. One-time Court-Ready Reports are non-refundable once the PDF has been generated, because the report has been signed and published to the verification ledger.

Question 36

Will I be charged automatically?

Accepted Answer

Yes — subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period unless you cancel. You can cancel renewal at any time from Settings → Billing. Cancellation stops future charges; it does not pro-rate the remaining time in the current period. Your subscription remains active through the end of the period you have already paid for.

Question 37

Can CoParent.Help provide legal advice?

Accepted Answer

No. CoParent.Help does not provide legal advice and is not a law firm. The platform is a records system. The custodian declaration we include with every Court-Ready export is a standard template we prepare in our capacity as custodian of the underlying records — it is not legal counsel and does not substitute for an attorney. If you are navigating a custody case, retain an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.

Question 38

Is the platform "court-approved" or "court-certified"?

Accepted Answer

No platform is "court-approved" — approval is a property of a tribunal applied to specific evidence in a specific case, not a property of a software product. We do not use that phrase and you should be skeptical of any platform that does. What we provide is records that are structured to meet the foundational requirements that courts already apply to digital business records.

Question 39

Do you pay referral fees to attorneys?

Accepted Answer

No. We do not pay referral fees and do not participate in any arrangement that would violate rules of professional conduct. Attorneys may recommend the platform to clients; we provide direct onboarding support and Litigation Hold Pro guidance, but no financial compensation flows from us to the recommending attorney.

Question 40

What jurisdiction governs the platform?

Accepted Answer

CoParent.Help is available across the United States. Our Terms of Service designate the governing law and venue for disputes. We respond to legal process from any U.S. jurisdiction following the law that applies to that process.

Question 41

Are you GDPR / CCPA compliant?

Accepted Answer

We support GDPR and CCPA data rights. To exercise GDPR Article 20 (data portability), email smithappsupport@gmail.com and we deliver a complete JSON export of your data, typically within 3 business days. GDPR Article 17 (right to erasure) account deletion is available in-app from the Data Privacy page, and California residents have CCPA-equivalent rights. Our Cookies Policy describes the cookies we use, and the Privacy Policy details every right available to you and how to exercise it.

Question 42

Do you provide expert witness services?

Accepted Answer

We do not currently provide expert witness testimony as a service. The Court-Ready Report format is designed so that live testimony is not typically required — the records custodian declaration plus the public hash verifier together satisfy the authentication requirement under FRE 902(11) and most state equivalents. For cases where the court requires platform testimony, contact us at smithappsupport@gmail.com.

Question 43

How do attorneys use CoParent.Help in casework?

Accepted Answer

Typical pattern: a family-law attorney recommends the platform to a new client at intake. The client onboards and starts documenting from day one — messages, expenses, schedule changes. When the attorney needs evidence for a filing or hearing, the client generates a Court-Ready PDF with a date range, hands it to the attorney, and the attorney files it with the custodian declaration. The hash on the cover page lets opposing counsel verify independently. Attorneys who use the platform may save several billable hours per case versus assembling evidence from texts, screenshots, and email threads — the platform output is already organized and authenticated.

Question 44

How do mediators use CoParent.Help?

Accepted Answer

Mediators do not have time to read three years of texts. They have time for a hash-verified summary. Parents who walk into mediation with a Court-Ready Report transform the conversation from "let me tell you what happened" to "here is what happened, signed and verifiable." Mediators report that mediated agreements are easier to reach when both parties are working from the same factual record.

Question 45

Can attorneys access a client's records directly?

Accepted Answer

No — and that is by design. The attorney never has the client's password and never logs into the client's account. To share records with an attorney, the client generates a Court-Ready PDF and sends it directly. This protects you from any claim that records were leaked or altered by us before they reached counsel. It also keeps the privilege boundary clear.

Question 46

Is there a discount for attorneys recommending us to clients?

Accepted Answer

We do not pay attorney referral fees (see Legal & Compliance above), but firms with multiple active matters using the platform can contact smithappsupport@gmail.com to discuss firm-level onboarding, bulk Litigation Hold provisioning, and direct support contact for the firm's paralegal team.

Question 47

How do custody evaluators and parenting coordinators use the records?

Accepted Answer

Both roles depend on objective behavioral data. A custody evaluator interviewing both parents is making inferences from competing self-reports; a CoParent.Help export turns those competing reports into a single shared record with timestamps and hashes. Parenting coordinators rely on the schedule timeline and message thread exports to identify patterns of non-compliance with court orders or parenting plans.

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