Social impact

Outside. Moving. Present. Then the phone.

Every rule asks someone to do something real before they scroll. And the money follows the same direction — half of what families pay through a school goes back to that school, a quarter of what residents pay goes back to their building, and venues list free.

A city square divided: people looking at phones on one side, people talking and moving on the other

Same square, same hour. The line is the only difference — and it is the one we are trying to move.

Why we built it What we give back Young people How we make money What we won’t claim

What the product is for.

Not what it achieves — we cannot prove that and we do not claim it. This is what we were aiming at when we chose these rules and not others.

Movement

Get outside. Move first.

Steps, push-ups or squats, going outdoors, walking somewhere. Four of the seven rules at launch ask for physical movement, and the alarm asks you to get out of bed and prove it.

Presence

Be in the room you are in

Focus Lock exists so a phone can be put away for dinner, for homework, for an afternoon with someone. The apps come back. The afternoon does not.

Community

Somewhere to walk to, someone to meet

Show Up turns a café, gym, library or pool into the reason someone leaves the house. And in student housing and build-to-rent, the fund pays for the events that get neighbours into the same room — which is the part a building cannot usually afford.

Local trade

Free for the small place

Listing is free forever. An independent café gets the same visibility as a chain, keeps every customer we send, and pays us nothing for them.

Comparison

One leaderboard, about living

Everyone competes under a nickname, on time spent away from a screen. Not looks, not money, not followers — and no child’s real name anywhere on it.

Ownership

You set the rule, not us

Nothing is imposed. You choose the apps, the condition and the window — and the override always works, because friction is the point and a cage is not.

Where this came from, honestly: our founder finds it hard to start things unless they are urgent or interesting, and reaching for a phone is the easiest available escape from a task. Friction was the only thing that reliably helped — not motivation, not intention, just making the escape marginally harder than the task. That is the whole product, and it is why it is built around doing one thing first rather than doing less of something.

We know people will read that and think of ADHD, and some of our users will have it. We are not going to make that claim. This is not a treatment, it has no clinical evidence behind it, and an app that markets itself at a diagnosis it has never tested against is doing something we are not willing to do. If it helps you, we are glad — but you should hear that from other users, not from us.

Where the money goes

A subscription that pays for books.

Every figure is a share of what actually reaches us, after VAT and after Apple’s commission — illustrated using a 30% store cut, with actual contributions determined from eligible payments, taxes, applicable fees, refunds and the partner agreement.

Schools and trusts

50%

Of net Family proceeds, into a named fund the school controls — cover teaching, books, art and music materials, trips, catch-up classes.

The highest share we pay anyone

Student housing, build to rent

25%

Into a named resident fund, quarterly — and in practice it pays for the things that get people out of their flats. Resident events, socials, a communal breakfast, a run club, kit for a shared space. The things a building wants to do and rarely has budget for.

No fee to the operator, ever

Universities and unions

35%

Unions tend to spend it on night buses, exam-week breakfasts and society start-up grants.

Published, so students can see it

Venues

Free

Listing on Show Up costs nothing and always will. Advertising placements are optional and entirely separate.

A café pays us nothing to be listed

The schools share is the highest deliberately. School budgets have been cut for a decade and the non-statutory things go first — art materials, music, trips, cover teaching, books. That is what the fund is for, and the school decides, not us.

Young people

The habit forms at eleven.

A phone habit formed at eleven is not a decision anyone made. It is a pattern laid down before there was any choice in it, by apps engineered to be difficult to put down. An adult changing it is unpicking fifteen years of practice. A child is not unpicking anything — they are learning the order of things while the order is still being set.

Why age limits will not fix this

Remove one app and it gets replaced by the next.

Age checks take years to arrive, children route around them within weeks, and even where they work they only cover social media. Netflix is not being blocked. Disney is not being blocked. Games are not being blocked. A child stopped from scrolling at eight o’clock has a dozen other things to open, and they will open one of them.

That substitution is the thing most tools miss, and it is the reason this one works differently. Put a condition in front of all of them and there is nothing left to substitute — so you end up talking to someone, getting a board game out, or going outside, because those are what remain. Not because anyone lectured anybody about it.

From our founder · born 1994

I got a whole education before any of this existed.

Why one person who grew up without a feed decided to build this — the childhood, the clothes, the Xbox, and the bit about dinner time.

READ IT · FOUR MINUTES ↓

Primary school, secondary school, most of college — no phone worth the name. The first iPhone arrived and even then, you opened Instagram, scrolled for a few minutes, and you were caught up. There was an end to it. The only real distraction I had was an Xbox, and an Xbox is finite: you finish the game, or your mum tells you to stop.

So I read. I studied. I took extra courses at school to get into a better college, and the reason was not discipline — it was that there was nothing else competing for the hours. Boredom did a lot of the work that I would now have to fight for.

An eleven-year-old today has none of that. The feed does not end, the content does not run out, and the comparison never stops — not because anyone is being cruel, but because an infinite feed measurably outperforms a finite one, so that is what got built. A child is not competing against a game they can finish. They are competing against something engineered never to finish.

The other half of it was outside. On a bike, at a friend’s door, exploring places we probably should not have been. You learned to talk to people because there was no alternative to talking to people — you turned up, you negotiated what you were doing, you fell out and sorted it out by Tuesday. Those are social skills and nobody taught them to us on purpose.

Now it is in the hallway at breaktime, and in primary school. And the thing I keep coming back to is the clothes. We all dressed roughly the same and none of us needed the best of anything, because there was no running tally of what everyone else had. You just lived. Now there is a tally, it updates all day, and it is running in a child’s pocket.

To be fair to it: this is not a case against phones. An enormous amount of good has come from them and plenty of people have built careers and found their people through exactly these apps. I am not nostalgic for a worse world. What I do not accept is that it has to cost a childhood to get the upside — and right now a child has no way to limit it, because nothing is built to be limited.

So we gave the control to parents, and we gave the app to the child. In a world where a ten-year-old has no realistic means of managing this on their own, a parent being able to say “not until after school” seems like the least we could build — and the child still gets the whole product, and their own private half of it, because being managed is not the same as being helped.

That is the whole reason the schools fund is the biggest thing we pay out. I cannot give a child the version of childhood where the distraction had an ending. What I can do is put one real thing in front of it each morning, and send half of what their parents pay to the school that is trying to hold their attention for six hours a day on a cut budget.

And honestly, I am building this for children I do not have yet. I went looking for something that would make a kid go outside or do ten push-ups before the phone opened, and something that would hold every app at dinner time so we actually hear about each other’s day. I did not want to turn the Wi-Fi off — that punishes the whole house and teaches nobody anything. I wanted the apps to wait for half an hour. I could not find it, so we built it.

Worth being precise about all of that. The comparison between a finite distraction and an infinite one is an observation about how these products are designed, and we stand behind it. Everything else above is one person’s conviction about the childhood he had and the one he sees now — strongly held, and still not evidence. We have deliberately left out the population-level arguments people make in this space, including the ones about falling test scores: the trends are real and the cause is genuinely contested, and we are not going to borrow a correlation we cannot explain to sell a subscription. It is not a claim about brain development, attention spans, mental health or learning outcomes. Those need research we have not done, and you will not find us implying them anywhere on this site.

The whole app, not a cut-down one

Children get their own rules, Focus Lock, alarm and private results. Show Up is unavailable on child accounts. A parent adds School Day on top — they do not take features away.

Private from their parent

The rules a child builds for themselves, and their own results, are theirs. A parent sees the Family restrictions they manage, task confirmations and requests their child sends. Messages, browsing, location and the child’s own rules and results stay private.

Never a lecture

A child’s account cannot be set to the sharper adult tones, and a parent cannot enable them. No shaming, no guilt for a broken streak, no manufactured urgency.

Always a way out they can take alone

Every restriction has a route the child can complete themselves, a time-based end on by default, and an override that works offline. A child is never stuck waiting on a parent to reply.

Out of every dataset we sell

Children are excluded from commercial reporting at the schema level — not by policy, by structure. There is no setting that could turn it on.

How we actually make money.

Including the parts that are less flattering. An impact page that only lists the good decisions is marketing — so here is the whole model, and the lines we hold inside it.

Subscriptions

MOST OF IT

People paying for the app

The large majority of our revenue, and we would like it to stay that way. It is the only model where our interests and yours point the same direction.

The line: No free tier funded by something else.

Marketing

YES, WE BUY ADS

We advertise to find you

We run paid advertising to get the app in front of people — on social platforms included. There is no clever way to say that, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

The line: We buy advertising. We do not sell it. There is no ad network, tracker or third-party analytics SDK inside the app, and there never will be.

Aggregate reporting

YES, WE SELL THIS

We sell reports built from behaviour

City and national statistics, and cohort reports for institutions — how many people completed rules, how many steps, what time of day, where the time went. Businesses use it to understand demand, plan events and advertise better.

The line: Aggregates only, never individuals. Above a minimum group size. Never children, never health data, never locations, and only from adults who opted in.

Venue advertising

PAID PLACEMENT

Venues can pay for position

A café or gym can pay to appear more prominently in its city’s list. Where they have, it says so.

The line: A paid placement can never push a nearer venue below a further one. Distance always wins.

Hardware

AT COST-PLUS

Physical tags

An NFC tag for the kitchen or the hallway. Every rule but Tap needs no hardware at all.

The line: We will not overstate how much you need one.

The part most impact pages leave out

What we will not claim

Everything on this page is what we are aiming at, not what we have proven. We are not telling you this improves concentration, mental health, relationships, fitness, focus or attainment. We have no evidence for any of it — and the fact that it all sounds plausible is exactly why we will not say it.

What we can evidence

How many people completed a rule, and when

How long selected apps stayed shut inside a window

Steps contributed by adults who opted in

Check-ins at a venue, and repeat visits

What a school’s fund paid for, in their own words

Every figure with its methodology and limitations attached

What we will never say

“Improves concentration” or “helps you focus”

“Helps with ADHD”, or anything about a diagnosis

“Improves mental health” or “reduces anxiety”

“Makes you fitter” or anything about weight

“Raises attainment” or “improves behaviour”

“Strengthens relationships”

Any claim that a child benefited, to anyone

How a claim gets earned

The reporting is the evidence, and we are building it first.

Everything on this page is an intention because we have no data yet. The point of the reporting is to change that — not to sell dashboards, but to be able to answer two questions honestly: how are people spending their time, and what difference does it make.

MEASURED NOW

Where the time goes

Rules completed, minutes apps stayed shut, steps contributed, what people say they did instead — with the response rate published every time.

MEASURED NOW

Whether it lasts

Retention at 30 and 90 days, and streak length. A habit that holds for three months is the only interesting version.

FROM Q2 2027

What people report back

Self-reported outcomes, designed properly, with the bias and the non-response stated alongside the numbers.

FROM 2027

What the funds paid for

What real schools and real buildings spent real money on, in their words. The most concrete impact evidence we expect to have for a while.

Which is also the honest answer to why we sell reports. A dataset nobody pays for does not get built, maintained or audited. Selling aggregate reporting to institutions and businesses is what funds the measurement — and the measurement is the only route from “we think this helps” to something we can actually stand behind.

Which is why we publish the methodology with every figure. Counts of things that happened, with their limitations stated, are worth more than an outcome we cannot defend — to a school, to a regulator, and to anyone judging whether this deserves recognition.

What we are working towards.

Intentions with dates, not achievements. Nothing here is done yet, and we will update this page as each one lands rather than quietly rewording it.

Before Family public launch

IN PROGRESS

Children’s Code assessment

An independent privacy assessment against the ICO’s Age Appropriate Design Code, before Family ships.

January 2027

COMMISSIONED

Independent accessibility audit

WCAG 2.2 AA across the app, the site, the portals and our reports. Findings and remediation published, including what we have not fixed.

January 2027

PLANNED

Safeguarding review

Independent, and required before we work with any school or trust. Not a condition of releasing Family to parents, and we will not pretend it is.

Q2 2027

PLANNED

First outcome survey

Self-reported, with the response rate and the bias published alongside it. Designed properly or not run at all.

2027

PLANNED

First school funds published

What real schools spent real money on, in their words, with the figures. The only evidence of impact we expect to have for a while.

Ongoing

NOT YET

Social impact recognition

We would like this work judged externally. We are not applying for anything until the assessments above exist — an award won on a promise is worth nothing.

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