RoostBook — a record for backyard chickens

The reason you open it

Log your eggs every day with one tap.

Tap once for each egg you collect and RoostBook keeps the day's total for all your chickens. It takes a second on the way back from the coop, and every figure in the app grows out of it.

A wicker basket of brown, cream and speckled eggs sitting in grass, with two daisies beside it.

A day you looked counts

Going out and finding none is recorded as a day you looked, which is its own useful fact and shapes every rate you are shown afterwards.

By hen, when you want it

Log which chicken laid what, with the shell colour, whenever it suits you. The daily total is one tap either way.

See your egg totals by week, month and year

RoostBook adds up every egg you log and shows you how each of your hens is doing. You see exactly how all your chickens are laying, season by season.

Sunday 6 September

Today

Eggs today

7

Recorded at 8:12. Tap to add another.

Add an egg

Thirty-one eggs this week, from six hens.

TodayYardEggsDiaryMore

Four hens standing at the open door of a red coop, with a bucket and a wooden fence beside it.

Six birds

The yard

Hattie

Orpington · four years

Nineteen days since her last egg. She is in moult.

Pip

Silkie · two years

Sitting. Day 11 of 21. Candling was noted on day 7.

Marigold

Sussex · one year

Laying. Nothing else recorded.

TodayYardEggsDiaryMore

How your chickens are doing

Get updates and monitor your chickens' health.

Record what you see about each of your birds and RoostBook organizes all your chickens onto one screen, with how every hen is doing today.

Sort it by whatever you want to check — days since a hen last laid, her age, her breed — so the bird who needs you is the one you spot first. Every observation, treatment, weight and photograph stays on her record with the date you wrote it.

How every hen looks comes from what you recorded about her.

That is the rule that makes the screen worth trusting: everything you can see about one of your chickens is something you or your vet put there.

Your birds keep their own histories underneath. Tap any hen for everything that has happened to her, in the order it happened.

Every bird you keep

Add all your birds with their name, breed, history and more.

Add each of your chickens with her name, breed, hatch date, leg band and a photo, along with everything that has happened to her since.

All of your birds and their details live in one place, so you can find what you need whenever you need it. An unknown hatch date is a real answer, and so are rescued birds, inherited birds and birds staying somewhere else.

A small red coop with a mossy plank roof, hens in the doorway and one hen standing among ox-eye daisies in the foreground.

Identify your birds' breeds from what you can see

Answer her comb, her pattern, whether her legs are feathered and what colour egg she lays, and RoostBook shows you the breeds she could be. You get her breed onto her record from what is standing in front of you.

Share health records with your vet directly

Send your vet a link to one of your chickens and they open her full health record on their phone straight away, so a conversation about a sick hen starts with the facts.

Your records are yours to take

Export what you have recorded as a file, on any plan and at any time. A correction sits beside the original and both stay, so the history reads the way it happened.

Medicine

Record your birds' medication and know when the withdrawal ends.

Start a treatment, log each dose as it is given, and enter the withdrawal period from the label in your hand.

RoostBook counts the days forward and marks every egg you log inside the window, so you always know where you are with your birds' eggs. The number comes off the label you are holding or from your vet, and the decision stays with the two of you.

A treatment is a course rather than a one-off note: what was prescribed, what was actually given, paused and resumed, across as many birds as it covers.

Hattie

Medicine

Withdrawal

Flubenvet, started 2 September. Seven days off eggs, taken from the label you entered.

Ends Wednesday 9 September.

Eggs today

4

Inside the withdrawal window. Marked on the record.

TodayYardEggsDiaryMore

Spring

Follow your broody hens and your hatches through to day twenty-one.

Mark one of your hens broody or set a clutch and RoostBook counts the days for you, marking the candling days at seven and fourteen. At the end you record what actually happened, so next spring you know which of your hens to trust with a clutch.

A clutch in an incubator works the same way, and the chicks that come out of it become bird records linked back to the clutch they came from.

Broody, day 11 Candle on Thursday Clutch of 8 Point of lay, about November Worming due Moult likely, October Withdrawal ends Wednesday

The red coop under deep snow, bare birches around it, four hens on the trodden path to the door.

What they cost

Track all your chickens' costs and see them by hen.

Add your feed, bedding, medicines and vet bills as you buy them and RoostBook totals them up by category and by bird.

You see what all your chickens cost you across the year, and what a dozen of your own eggs cost you to produce. It is the number every keeper gets asked about and almost nobody can answer.

This year

£312

Feed £184 · Bedding £61 · Medicine £34 · Equipment £33

A dozen of your own costs £1.94.

From 1,930 eggs collected since January.

The part we are strict about

How every hen looks comes from what you recorded about her.

Everything you can see about one of your chickens on this app is something you or your vet put there, with the date you wrote it.

That is what makes the screen worth trusting, and it is why RoostBook is a record rather than a game. Your birds are yours, your history is yours, and the app's job is to keep both of them straight.

Free for eight birds, for as long as you like.

Free

Up to eight birds, which is what most backyard keepers actually have. The daily egg count, every bird's record, health, costs, reminders and export, all of it, for as long as you keep eight or fewer.

$39.99 a year

From your ninth bird on. One tier, everything in it, and the same app you were already using.

RoostBook is still being built. This page will tell you the day there is something to open.

The coop at dusk with a lamp lit in the round window, three hens walking up the path to the open door.

A red cottage among tall birches at the end of a worn path, with three hens in the grass outside the door.

Tell me when it opens.

One email, the day there is something to open, with a leave link in it.