Why I built freekidsevents

I’m a dad of three in San Francisco. My two older kids, a son and a daughter, are 5 and 3. Our youngest is a baby girl. Yeah!

When she was born, I got weekend duty with the two older ones. My wife assigned it, hehe. So every week I had the same question. Where do we go this weekend?

We only go to free things. Tickets for two kids plus me and my wife, then parking, add up fast.

And there is a lot of free stuff for kids. Libraries run storytimes and craft clubs. Parks run nature walks. Museums have free days. We’ve been to SFMOMA once, just me and the two of them. Kids 18 and under always get in free there, and on its Free Community Days adults are free too.

The hard part was finding it all. Every library, park district and museum has its own calendar, so every week I was checking site after site.

I used to be an engineering manager at Credit Karma and Intuit. When I wrote this, I was a solopreneur building my own products (more at nilni.com). So I built freekidsevents. It pulls those official calendars into one place, keeps the free events for kids up to 12, and shows what’s on near you. Every event links back to the organizer, so you can double-check before you go.

It works with AI assistants too. Dot, Grok, Muse, Dulet, OpenClaw and Hermes can search it through our MCP server, so you can ask yours what’s free near you this Saturday. Setup is on the for AI agents page.

We started with the Bay Area. Seattle, Los Angeles, New York and Austin are on there now too.

If something is wrong, or you run free kids events that aren’t listed, email me at hello@freekidsevents.com.

Nil