Get Milk!
2026 · Product design, brandGet Milk! is news made actionable.
Get Milk! is news made actionable. For years I felt that following the news made me feel informed rather than actually be informed. For the most part, it did an exceptional job of stirring my blood, and produced zero actionable insights.
Get Milk! takes the opposite approach. By cleverly using California’s Brown Act, the app scans local policy APIs and outlets, verifies what it finds, and translates it into simple English that shows what actually affects you. And it makes taking action as easy as posting online.
PG&E wants to raise your electric bill
Est. +$26/month for your household · public comment window open · draft ready to file
- Jul 17Day one
Four questions. ZIP code, rent or own, work, household. Still called Actionable.
- Jul 17Interface
The radar. Only two kinds of alert: Speak up and Claim it.
- Jul 17Action
The alert. What is changing, why it affects you, and a draft comment you edit before sending.
- Jul 17Ledger
The record. A record of what you filed, what you won and what you claimed.
- Aug 5Renamed
Get Milk! Named after Harvey Milk. The look changes from paper green to navy and milk.
- Aug 11Launch
getmilk.net. Day 25. Public launch. A weekly email instead of push notifications.
- AugPricing test
The $2.99 tier. A paid tier, built and then dropped. Free for private citizens.
- Aug 22Paused
Then quiet. The last piece of work was the brand sheet. The project stopped here.
The product laws, written before the code. The app was still called Actionable then.
Every alert must have a deadline and a done-state. Proclamations, debates, and things already decided never fire. All-quiet is the default state; the silence is the feature.
LLM analysis runs once per docket item and produces an audience predicate; matching users is deterministic code. Cost scales with legislative output, not user count.
Done-states are evidence — a sent email in the record, a tracking number from an API — never self-reported.
Community activity is visible in aggregate (neighborhood counts), never as personal profiles.
Four questions, then nothing, most weeks.Radar turning, city talking,Every word of it someone else’s business.Eventually, a Tuesday: a rate hike, six days left,Blinking once in red at the edge of the map.Right there, a draft already written for you.It waits for your hand. You change a line.Then you send it, and it lands on the public record.Nothing else happens for weeks.Everyone else keeps scrolling.You don’t. That was always the idea.
Civic information is either a firehose or a newsletter. The prototype started at the opposite end: four questions, no account theatre, and an explicit promise that we would rather you never open the app.
A radar, not a feed. Only decisions with an open window and a real deadline surface; everything else is a quiet week, stated as such. The ledger afterwards keeps the receipts — filed, won, lost, claimed.
The rename did the work the copy could not: a chore you already do, on a schedule, with a red pin. Navy and milk, a badge that behaves like a button, and a promise in the subhead rather than a manifesto.
Testers described Actionable as "another civic app" and Get Milk! as "the thing that tells me when to show up". Same product, same screens. The comparison made the case for spending a week on a name instead of a feature.
- Founded
- 2026-07-17
- Public launch
- 2026-08-11
- Commits
- 81 · 25 days to launch
- Sources
- Federal Register · CPUC · SF · Legistar · BoardDocs
- State
- Live · paused Aug 22