Laevo — Latin for lift up
Nobody who comes to your door is a case number.
Laevo keeps track of the food on your shelves and the neighbors you have helped, so a volunteer-run pantry can spend Saturday on people instead of paperwork.
The problem is rarely the food
Most pantries can find the food. What runs them into the ground is everything around it.
It is the third person this morning being asked their household size again, out loud, with four people listening. It is the case of peaches found behind the newer case, two months past its date. It is the volunteer who did not come because nobody reminded her. It is the Tuesday evening in October spent counting a quarter's worth of clipboard entries into a form that was due Friday.
None of that is a food problem. All of it is a keeping-track problem, and keeping track is something software is genuinely good at — if it is built for the person actually doing it.
What a Saturday looks like with Laevo
- At the window. Type three letters of a name or a card code. The household is there with its size and its needs. One big button records the visit.
- On the shelf. What is running low and what is closest to its date, on the screen you already had open.
- On the rota. Volunteers claim their own shifts from a link. Everyone gets a reminder two days before.
- At the end of the month. The report is already drafted from the visits you recorded, and it shows you which visits made each number.
What this is built on
Seven things we decided before writing any code
Each one is paired with the specific thing the software does because of it. A value you cannot point at in the product is not a value, it is decoration.
Nobody who comes to your door is a case
A person standing at a pantry window on a Tuesday is having a hard month, not a permanent condition. They have a name, a family, and somewhere else they would rather be. The record you keep about them should read like a neighbor's name in a book, not a file number in a system.
Build for the person having the hardest week
Most software is designed for the confident user with a good phone and a quiet room. Almost nobody at a food pantry is that person. The volunteer is seventy-three and borrowed her grandson's tablet. The neighbor is embarrassed and in a hurry and it is raining.
Food is not a reward for good behavior
Eating is not something a person earns by filling in a form correctly. A pantry may have paperwork it is required to file, and that is real, but the paperwork exists to serve the food — never the other way around.
The people closest to the work make the decisions
Nobody at a software company knows whether your pantry should be choice-model or pre-bagged, whether to serve people from the next county, or how often a family can come. Those are judgements made by people who know the street, and they are not ours to make.
A volunteer's Saturday is not free
Unpaid does not mean worthless. Every hour someone spends copying numbers off a clipboard into a spreadsheet is an hour they did not spend talking to somebody who needed to be talked to, or an hour they did not spend at home.
Food thrown away is a loss twice over
Somebody grew it, somebody gave it, somebody drove it across town — and then it sat behind the newer cases until it went off. That is not just wasted food. It is wasted work and wasted generosity, and it is almost always a tracking problem rather than a caring problem.
Nobody does this alone
A pantry is held up by a food bank, a hall somebody lends them, a grocery manager who sets aside the dented cans, a retired bookkeeper who does the numbers, and forty people who show up. The software should make that web easier to see, not flatten it into one login.
What Laevo actually does
Six things, done properly, instead of thirty things done thinly.
Neighbors
One record per household that lasts between visits, with size, ages and what they cannot eat. Returning is a lookup, not a second interview. Laevo notices when a new record looks like one you already have and asks you — it never merges anything on its own.
The window
Check someone in on one screen in under a minute. Search by name, phone, or a short card code they can carry. Serve first and record after if the queue is long — no required field ever stands between a person and a bag of groceries.
The shelf
What you have, in the units you actually count in — cans, bags, loaves, pounds. Plain warnings about what is running low and what is closest to its date, on the screen you already look at, not in a report you have to remember to run.
Volunteers
Shifts with a public link, so people claim their own instead of going through one coordinator's inbox. Reminders two days before, which is the cheapest useful thing in this whole product. Hours logged, because in-kind hours are real match money on a grant application.
Reports
TEFAP, CSFP and state household and individual counts, drafted from the visits you already recorded, with the working shown — click a number and see which visits made it. A person checks it and files it, because a person is accountable for it.
Moving in
Export a CSV from whatever you use now. Laevo reads the column headers, shows you its guess with how sure it is, and saves nothing until you say yes. Most pantries are moved over in an afternoon.
What switching would be worth
Your numbers, our arithmetic, and every assumption printed underneath so you can argue with it.
How this is worked out, so you can argue with it: we assume 33% of your manual hours come back — not half, because we would rather be low and right than high and impressive. The software figure is the midpoint of what pantries actually report paying for that tool, which is often higher than the published starting price. If your real numbers beat this, good. If they do not, tell us and we will change the assumptions.
What pantries actually pay elsewhere
Ranges reported by pantry operators, not starting prices from a marketing page. Every one of these tools beats Laevo at something, and the comparison pages say what.
| What you might use | Typical monthly cost | Charges per user? |
|---|---|---|
| PantrySoft | $75 – $150 | No |
| Link2Feed | $90 – $150 | No |
| Oasis Insight | $20 – $60 | Yes |
| Spreadsheets and a signup site | $0 – $90 | No |
| Paper and a binder | $0 | No |
| Laevo | $0 – $59 | Never |
Three prices, on one page, in numbers
No setup fee. No per-user fee. No per-feature fee. No contract.
Community
Free forever. Not a trial.
$0 forever
- Everything in Laevo — no locked features
- One pantry location
- Up to 400 households a month
- Neighbor records, visits, shelf counts, volunteer shifts
Standard
For a busy pantry that has outgrown free.
$19 / month
- Everything in Community
- No ceiling on households served
- One pantry location
- Priority email support, same day on weekdays
Network
For a food bank or a parish with several pantries.
$59 / month
- Everything in Standard
- As many locations as you run
- One report across every location
- Each location keeps its own login and its own decisions
Everything on the pricing page, including what is not included
Writing for people who run pantries
Useful whether or not you ever sign up. That is the point of it.
How to start a food pantry that lasts
The practical order of operations for starting a food pantry: who to call first, what you legally need, what you can skip, and the two things that close most new pantries inside two years.
PaperworkTEFAP reporting without the dread
What TEFAP actually asks a pantry for, why quarter end hurts, and how to record things during the month so the report is a printout instead of an evening of counting.
VolunteersHelping older volunteers use a tablet
Practical, tested advice for pantries whose volunteers are in their seventies and eighties: what actually goes wrong with tablets and phones, and the setup that removes most of it.
Questions people actually ask
Is the free plan really free?
Yes, and it is not a trial. A pantry serving up to 400 households a month at one location pays nothing, forever, with every feature turned on. We do not ask for a card. If you approach the limit we tell you before you cross it, not after.
Do you charge per volunteer login?
No, and we never will. Charging per user is a tax on including people, and a pantry should not have to decide who is worth a login.
Do you charge per family we serve?
No. The number of people at your door is not our revenue model, and a pricing page that grows as need grows is a pricing page pointed the wrong way.
Our volunteers are older and not confident with phones. Will they manage?
That is who Laevo is designed for first, not as an afterthought. Big text that gets bigger with one tap, buttons you can hit while holding a box, one thing per screen, plain words, and no critical function hidden behind a swipe or a menu. There is a whole page about what that changed in the product.
Can we get our data back out?
In one click, whole, as a plain file, at any time — including on the day you decide to leave. Your records are yours. Holding data hostage is a business model we have chosen not to have.
What happens to our existing records?
Export a CSV from whatever you use now and Laevo reads the columns itself, shows you its guess, and waits for you to say yes before saving anything. Most pantries are moved over in an afternoon. We do not promise five minutes, because that has not been true for anyone we have watched do it.
Do you use our data to train anything, or sell it?
No. Not sold, not rented, not mined, not used to train a model. We do not have a business model that would tempt us to, and we would rather say that plainly than bury it in a privacy policy.
Have a look before you decide anything
The demo is a real pantry with a real Saturday in it — forty-six neighbors, three months of visits, a shelf with things going out of date. No signup, no email address, nothing to cancel.