What's New Across the Valaryn Ecosystem

Our products share a design language and a release rhythm, which means an improvement in one often shows up in the others a few weeks later. This cycle had a common theme, and it was not new features. It was making existing things clearer.

Nearly everything below started as feedback from households and organizations using these products daily. Where a change came from a specific recurring request, we have said so.

HomeHalo: clearer visibility, finer control

HomeHalo protects a family's home network — showing what is connected, filtering content, and enforcing schedules. The most common feedback we received was not about protection strength. It was that people could see devices but not people.

Improved family visibility

Devices can now be grouped into family profiles, so a child with a tablet, a laptop, and a games console appears as one person rather than three unrelated entries. Rules apply to the profile, which means a new device added to a profile inherits the right settings immediately instead of needing to be configured.

The home screen was rewritten around a single question: is anything unusual? It now answers that in about five seconds — a status line, anything that needs attention, and nothing else above the fold. Detail is still there; it is just no longer the first thing you have to read.

Enhanced filtering controls

Filtering is more precise in three ways. Categories can now be set per profile rather than only per device, so age-appropriate boundaries follow the person. Allow and block exceptions for individual sites are easier to add — a common need when a school platform gets caught by a broad category. And schedules now support different rules for school nights and weekends without creating two separate configurations.

We also reduced false positives across educational and health categories, which were the two areas generating the most exception requests.

Easier reporting

Reports used to be thorough and hard to read. They are now a short weekly summary in plain language: what was blocked, which profile was most active, and anything worth a conversation. The detailed view remains for anyone who wants it, and summaries can be sent as an email digest so nothing needs to be checked at all.

The Chef's Cookbook: better organization, better scans

The Chef's Cookbook preserves family recipes and turns them into everyday meal planning. As collections grew past a couple of hundred recipes, organization became the limiting factor.

Recipe organization improvements

Recipes now support custom collections alongside tags, so a family can keep "Grandma Ruth's," "Weeknight," and "Holiday" groupings without forcing a single hierarchy. Search covers ingredients as well as titles and notes, which makes the practical question — what can I make with buttermilk and chicken — answerable.

Bulk editing was added for the tidying phase that follows a big scanning session: rename, retag, and reassign many recipes at once instead of one at a time.

Better image handling

Scanning is noticeably more accurate on older handwriting, and multi-card recipes — the ones continued on a second card or the back of an envelope — can now be captured as a single recipe with several source images. Photographs load faster on slower connections, and the original scan is always one tap away from the typed version.

We also fixed a long-standing annoyance: images taken at an angle are now straightened automatically, which improves both readability and text recognition.

Meal planning enhancements

Meal plans can be built for a whole week from saved recipes, and the shopping list now consolidates duplicate ingredients across recipes rather than listing them separately — the single most requested change in this area. Lists are grouped by store section, and portions scale with the number of people eating.

PowerPlanMatch: faster and more accurate

PowerPlanMatch compares electricity plans against a household's real usage. This cycle was mostly engineering work with directly visible results.

Faster comparison engine

The comparison engine was rebuilt. Where a full comparison across available plans previously took several seconds, results now appear close to instantly, which changes how people use it — adjusting assumptions and re-running becomes exploratory rather than a wait.

Better cost projections

Projections now model month-by-month usage instead of an annual average. This matters more than it sounds: plans with usage-based bill credits behave very differently in a 700 kWh month than in an 1,100 kWh one, and averaging conceals exactly the risk a household needs to see. Seasonal patterns, base charges, and credit thresholds are all applied per month.

Each result now shows a projected twelve-month total, the effective rate at your own low and high months, and what happens when the contract term ends.

Improved user experience

Entering usage data is simpler, with a guided option for people who do not have a full year of history. Comparisons are easier to read side by side on a phone, and every number that comes from an assumption now says so.

Accend Web & Commerce: performance and reach

Accend Web & Commerce builds websites, online stores, and digital experiences for organizations. Improvements here are largely invisible to visitors, which is the point.

Faster site performance

Page delivery, image handling, and font loading were all reworked, with measurable improvements in Core Web Vitals — the load and responsiveness measurements search engines use as ranking signals. In practical terms, pages become usable sooner on mobile connections, which affects both conversions and search visibility.

Improved commerce experiences

Checkout was streamlined to fewer steps with clearer error messages, product pages support richer media, and inventory and order status are more reliable during traffic peaks.

Enhanced SEO capabilities

Structured data, per-page metadata, canonical handling, and sitemap generation are now built in rather than added afterwards. Content editors can set titles and descriptions per page without touching code, and accessibility improvements from our other products were carried across — better contrast, keyboard navigation, and screen reader labelling.

What we are working on next

A few things are in progress, described honestly as in-progress rather than promised:

• Shared household accounts, so two adults can manage settings and recipes without sharing one login.
• Better search across all products, including natural-language queries in The Chef's Cookbook.
• Continued accessibility work toward full WCAG 2.2 AA conformance across every product.
• Clearer data controls — a single place to see what each product stores and export or delete it.
• Broader plan coverage in PowerPlanMatch as we add markets.

We are also investing in the shared foundations underneath all four products. That is unglamorous work, but it is why small improvements now land more often and with fewer surprises. More detail on each product's roadmap will follow as those releases get closer.

If something in your household still feels harder than it should, that is the feedback we act on fastest. Most of the changes above started exactly that way.