About Stumbl

Bay Area libraries, parks departments, museums, farmers' market operators and city halls all publish their family programming. They just publish it in a dozen different places, in a dozen different formats, most of which are difficult to read on a phone while holding a toddler.

Stumbl checks those public calendars regularly, keeps the listings that are actually for families, and puts them on one page you can filter by city, age, category or day. Every listing links back to the organizer's own page, because they’re the ones who know if the storytime got cancelled.

We don’t run the events, take reservations, sell tickets, or have any relationship with the organizations we list. We are a signpost, not a promoter.

Stumbl is published by Spaghetti Labs, LLC, a one-person software company in the East Bay. There’s no newsroom and no editorial staff. The listings are collected automatically, and the guides are written by hand.

The site started as an iPhone app for finding things to do with friends. The events feed turned out to be the part people actually used, so it became the whole product, and the paywall came off. The app still exists if you want the calendar in your pocket.

Out of pocket. The site is free to use, carries no advertising, runs no affiliate links, and takes no payment from the venues or organizers it lists. Hosting a server-rendered site with a few thousand event records on it costs a few dollars a month, which is a reasonable price for scratching your own itch.

There is a tip jar for anyone who wants to chip in toward that. It’s entirely optional, it buys nothing, and it changes nothing about what you see here.

That’s worth saying plainly because it explains the incentives: nothing is ranked, boosted or featured because someone paid for it. Events appear in date order, and the only reason one city has more listings than another is that it publishes more.

Browsing this site needs no account and no sign-in. Specifically:

• Saved events stay on your device. The heart button writes to your browser's local storage. It never reaches our server, so it doesn’t sync between devices and it disappears if you clear site data. Your saved list lives here.
• No advertising or cross-site trackers. No ad network, no retargeting pixels, no social embeds.
• Email only if you ask for it. If you sign up for the weekly email we store that address to send you the weekly email, and unsubscribing removes it.
• Ordinary server logs. Requests are logged for a short period so we can tell when something is broken.

The full detail is in the privacy policy.

An event listed in the wrong place, at the wrong time, or that shouldn’t be here at all? Tell us and we’ll fix it. See where events come from for how corrections work, or just email contactstumblapp@gmail.com.

Privacy questions go to contactstumblapp@gmail.com. If you run a Bay Area family program and want your calendar included, the first address is the right one — we read every message.