August is National Breastfeeding Month, and one stereotype those recognizing the occasion want to reframe is that breastfeeding seems like an intuitive step for mothers. In reality, its mental, emotional and physical tolls make it one of the most difficult steps in parenthood. Some studies show that over 70% of mothers who chose to breastfeed often experience fatigue, increased postpartum depression and other physical problems.
One experienced app developer based in Raleigh is hoping to alleviate the mental stress that plagues new mothers, and especially the strains of keeping track of their own milk supplies and feeding schedules.
Milk Diary, the iOS app designed to simplify the feeding journey for new parents, was conceived after problems that founder Kaya Thomas experienced herself as a first-time mother. Her first-born was in the NICU for the first week after birth, which abruptly shifted Thomas’s feeding plans from nursing to pumping.
Thomas said she could not find an application that had the functions she wanted, like a personalized feeding schedule that would also keep track of how much milk she had stored. Most available apps on the market today are focused on the overall baby tracking experience, beyond breastfeeding—an option Thomas thinks can be overwhelming for new parents.
“A lot of baby tracking apps didn’t really focus on feeding,” Thomas explained. “Feeding felt like an afterthought that might have some features in an app, but you couldn’t track how much milk you had stored or how to set up a pumping and feeding schedule. I wanted something that is completely dedicated to the feeding process from end to end.”
After she completed her first breastfeeding journey, Thomas started building Milk Diary, a platform that wound up aligning perfectly with the timing of her second child this year.
How Milk Diary works
The app tracks how long a baby was feeding, how much a mother pumped in a certain amount of time, how much she nursed her baby each day, how much milk she has stored and, most importantly, the feeding patterns that are crucial to bring to each doctor’s visit to track a child’s growth and health.
Thomas said one of her intentions was to take more of the mental load off parents, rather than for Milk Diary to be used as just another tracking app. She emphasized that her app design is made to be personalized by the parent and to be straightforward.
“When it comes to technology development, I’m not expecting an app to be the solution to breastfeeding struggles or the systemic issues that make breastfeeding hard,” Thomas said. “I am hoping for the app to help ease some of that mental burden, because there is so much that parents are keeping in their head.”
Using her almost full decade of app development and management experience, Thomas also emphasized that while the app does utilize some artificial intelligence to make tracking faster and easier, AI is not the focal point of her app (as it is on so many). She said the usage of AI chatbots, while helpful, is becoming oversaturated and she’s seeing people become fatigued over the number of bots out there.
Milk Diary utilizes the option to type in specific details that you want to track, but it doesn’t make up the entire app. For example, a mother could text the chatbot to write down the latest bottle she fed or record her latest pump. The AI would organize this information in cohesive schedules and systems already built into the app, and which the mother has already personalized. The AI is not really there to ask questions, but is there to keep parents structured, Thomas explained.
But the most important part of the platform, that Thomas is particularly passionate about, concerns data. The data belongs to the parent and parent only. The iOS app will track the data that is only on the device’s cloud, and when the user is ready to delete, the data will delete as well. (Users do have the ability to download .csv files of their data to have for doctor’s visits.)
“This part of parenthood can feel really intimate, and while this data is important, you don’t want all the data about your child out in the ether,” Thomas said.
The Milk Diary journey so far
The Milk Diary app is currently available as a free download. If users are interested in incorporating the program into their breastfeeding journey, a monthly subscription is $4.99, yearly is $29.99 and lifetime is $49.99, which is a great deal for parents who are expecting to have more than one child, Thomas said. She emphasized that she is keen on keeping her products affordable and accessible for any parent.
After winning a $10K NC IDEA MICRO grant in April of this year, Thomas has developed bigger and better plans to bring this solution into the hands of more parents. Part of the funding is being used to reach the healthcare sector and put Milk Diary at the forefront of physicians’ minds. Understanding that consumer apps are an oversaturated market for these doctors, Thomas also hopes to be connected to doulas, lactation consultants and OBGYNs—people who have the time to look into these apps and have the clientele to recommend them.
Thomas is also hoping Milk Diary will evolve more into a platform supporting intentional accountability goals.
“One of the features I recently launched and is really important to the future of the app is this concept of daily goals,” Thomas said. “When you’re in the thick of new parenthood, you feel like you don’t necessarily know how much you’re really doing or keeping track of. I think having daily goals and being accountable towards a goal can really help you feel motivated and feel like ‘look what I’ve done.’”
QUICK BITS
Startup: Milk Diary
Founder: Kaya Thomas
Founded: 2025
Team size: 2
Location: Raleigh
Website: milkdiary.com
Funding: Bootstrapped
Postpartum depression and anxiety can affect 1 in 8 women—some studies say even 1 in 5 in the United States—in part because of issues like not feeling accomplished or worthy of their child’s development. Thomas hopes that the future of this app can show the true hard work that mothers do everyday, an insight that is often overlooked.
“Eventually, Milk Diary is more than a tracking app and should act as more of a motivational app to help parents feel more confident about their feeding journey and taking it to the next level,” Thomas explained.
With a couple thousand downloads under her belt so far, Thomas is open to meeting with maternal and women’s healthcare professionals who can lead her in the right direction to parents that need a solution like hers.
Thomas continues to use the app everyday not only to understand her own startup’s development, but also for the wellbeing of her own children and that of other mothers.
