Family Safety filters Edge. Your child installs Chrome.
PC Guardian filters underneath the browser, at the moment the PC looks up a web address.
Fourteen days of the Family tier, no card. After that you can stay on the free tier and keep filtering one PC.
ScopeWindows only. It does not filter phones, tablets or games consoles, and we will not pretend otherwise.
BoundaryIt is a protective tool, not a surveillance tool. No keystroke logging, no screenshots, no reading messages. Your child can see exactly what is monitored, and the agent sits visibly in the system tray where they can find it.
- Runs onWindows 10 21H2+ · Windows 11
- x64 and ARM64. Home, Pro, Enterprise and Education. There is no macOS agent and no phone agent.
- Where the filtering happens127.0.0.1:53
- Every DNS lookup on the PC is answered by a local resolver, and traffic to any other resolver is blocked. The policy is not something a browser can opt out of.
- Set-upunder 10 minutes
- Before we release, five non-technical testers each have to complete set-up unaided in under ten minutes on a clean Windows 11 Home machine. That is a release criterion, not a marketing figure.
- Published byCompany No. 17086112
- ClearCode Digital Ltd, of Chorley, Lancashire. Every file you download is signed under that name, and Windows shows it to you before anything installs.
Microsoft Family Safety is free and it is good at what it does.
What it does is filter Microsoft Edge.
What the free tool does
Microsoft Family Safety is free and it is good at what it does. What it does is filter Microsoft Edge. Download Chrome, or Brave, or a portable Firefox that runs straight out of the Downloads folder without ever being installed, and the filtering is simply not there.
What PC Guardian does
PC Guardian filters underneath the browser, at the moment the PC looks up a web address. The same rule applies in every browser and every application on the machine, including the ones you have never heard of, because it is not a browser setting to be got round by using a different browser.
What the free tool does
App blocking has the same shape. It holds for apps from the Microsoft Store. For ordinary Windows desktop programs it is close to cosmetic, and a standard account can still download an executable and run it from its own profile folder without asking anybody.
What PC Guardian does
Programs cannot be run out of the folders that downloads land in. That one rule stops most of what is on the internet under the heading of getting round parental controls.
What the free tool does
And when something is blocked that your child genuinely needs for a piece of homework, there is no way for them to ask and no way for you to answer from a shift at work. You find out afterwards, or you do not find out at all.
What PC Guardian does
And when your child hits a block, there is a button on the block page that says Ask a grown-up. It reaches your phone as a notification you can answer without opening anything: an hour, the rest of today, or no. The block lifts on their machine in about three seconds.
Read what it cannot do — the honest boundaries, including the one attack on this page we do not stop.
What happens when they try.
Marcus is thirteen. He is not malicious. He is curious, he has friends, and he will absolutely watch a two-minute video called how to bypass parental controls. Every attack in that video is a design requirement for us.
This is the attack list out of our own requirements document, rewritten in plain English and not shortened. Sixteen things a child tries. Fifteen of them stop. The sixteenth does not, and it is on the list anyway.
15/16Stopped
1/16Not stopped
| Outcome | What they try | What happens | How |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stopped | Install a different browser. | Nothing changes. The filter is not in the browser, so swapping the browser does not move it. Chrome, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi and a portable Firefox are all filtered identically, because all of them have to ask Windows for the address first. | DNS-level enforcement · applies to every process, not per-browser |
| Stopped | Download a portable browser and run it straight out of Downloads. | It will not start. Programs cannot be run from the folders that downloads land in, from the temporary folders, or from a USB stick. Your child sees a message naming what was blocked and a button to ask you about it. CaveatThis rule is blunt on purpose. It will occasionally stop something harmless that a child downloaded for a legitimate reason. That is what the ask-a-grown-up button is for, and you can allow any single program permanently in one tap. | %USERPROFILE%\Downloads · %LOCALAPPDATA% · %APPDATA% · %TEMP% · removable volumes |
| Stopped | Change the DNS server to 8.8.8.8. | The setting is put back within thirty seconds, and in the meantime nothing resolves anyway, because traffic to any DNS server other than the one on the PC is blocked outright. You get told that it happened. | Adapter DNS re-asserted every 30 s · WFP blocks remote port 53 to anything but 127.0.0.1 |
| Stopped | Turn on DNS-over-HTTPS so the lookups are hidden. | Three things stop this at once, so defeating any one of them is not enough. The setting is switched off and locked in Edge, Chrome and Firefox by Windows policy. The addresses of the large public DoH providers are blocked. And the domains browsers use to find those providers are blocked too. | Browser DoH policy = off · WFP block on 400+ DoH ranges, port 443 · bootstrap-domain blocklist |
| Stopped | Tether the PC to a phone and use the mobile data instead. | It makes no difference. We do not filter your broadband, we filter the PC. A tethered connection is just another network adapter, it gets the same resolver within thirty seconds, and the block on other DNS servers does not care which network you are on. CaveatThe PC is covered on someone else’s network. The phone itself is not, and nothing we sell covers it. | All active adapters set to loopback · re-asserted every 30 s · WFP filters are network-agnostic |
| Stopped | Boot into Safe Mode, where startup programs do not run. | Both services are registered to start in Safe Mode as well as normally, with networking and without it. Safe Mode is a normal boot as far as this is concerned. | HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\SafeBoot\{Minimal,Network} |
| Stopped | Open Task Manager and end the PC Guardian service. | A standard Windows account is not permitted to stop it. If it does stop for any other reason, the second service starts it again within two seconds, and the restart is recorded in your feed rather than passing quietly. | Service ACL denies SERVICE_STOP and DELETE to interactive users · restart < 2 s |
| Stopped | End the watchdog instead, then end the service. | There is no first one to kill. The two services watch each other every two seconds and each restarts the other, so stopping one is what starts it again. | Mutual QueryServiceStatusEx poll · 2 s · shared heartbeat, 3 misses triggers restart |
| Stopped | Disable it in the Services control panel. | That needs administrator rights, and the child’s account is a standard account. The installer checks this and will not enrol an administrator account quietly. CaveatThis is the one that depends on you. If you override the installer’s warning and leave your child as an administrator on the PC, this attack works and several others get easier. The installer makes you type out a confirmation phrase before it will let you do it, because it matters that much. | Standard-account enforcement at enrolment · admin-privilege detection |
| Stopped | Create a new Windows account without the restrictions. | A standard account cannot create accounts. If one appears anyway — because somebody with an administrator password made it — the agent notices and tells you. | Account creation events watched via ETW · alert to parent |
| Stopped | Log in as somebody else who already has an account on the PC. | Enrolment maps every account on the machine, and any account that is not mapped is blocked from signing in. There is no unwatched account left over to move to. | All local accounts enumerated at enrolment · unmapped accounts denied logon by policy |
| Stopped | Uninstall it from Add or Remove Programs. | The uninstaller asks for your PIN and checks it with us before it will proceed. If the PC has no internet it takes a one-time code from your phone app instead. Five wrong attempts locks the prompt for half an hour. | Parent PIN verified cloud-side · offline fallback is a HOTP code from the parent app |
| Stopped | Remove the browser extension. | The remove button is not there. The extension is installed by Windows policy, which the user cannot undo, and it checks in every five minutes so its absence is noticed. CaveatThe extension is a convenience, not the defence. It makes the block page look right and backstops safe search. If it disappeared entirely, the filtering would carry on without it. | ExtensionInstallForcelist policy · heartbeat every 5 min · EXTENSION_REMOVED after 24 h silent |
| Stopped | Put the clock back an hour to get more screen time. | Time is counted against our server’s clock, not the PC’s. A drift of more than two minutes raises a high-severity alert and buys no extra minutes. | Local UTC compared to signed server time on every heartbeat · drift over 120 s raises CLOCK_TAMPER_DETECTED |
| Stopped | Unplug the network cable, or turn the Wi-Fi off. | The last policy the PC received is held in an encrypted local file and keeps being enforced for as long as the machine is offline. Time limits keep counting, temporary permissions still expire on time, and you are told after thirty minutes of silence. CaveatGoing offline is not a way round the filter, but it is a way to stop new blocks and new permissions reaching the PC until it reconnects. | AES-256-GCM local cache · enforcement duration indefinite · offline alert at 30 min |
| The one we do not stopNot stopped | Boot the PC off a USB stick and edit Windows from outside it. | This works. We are not running when the machine is booted from something else, and Windows can be edited while it is switched off. Nothing in this product stops it, and any product that told you otherwise would be lying to you. CaveatIt takes a USB stick, a downloaded boot image, a change to the firmware boot order and instructions followed carefully. That is adult-level effort, not a two-minute video, which is why it sits outside what we design against. The setup wizard shows you how to set a firmware password on the PC, and that is the actual defence. If your child is at the point of doing this, the problem is not a software problem. | Not defended in v1.0.0 |
When one of these stops working
New ways round parental controls turn up on YouTube and TikTok every few months, and some of them will work on us. That is the nature of it. What matters is what happens next.
Two commitments, and they are both written into the requirements rather than into an advert. Before a release goes out, every attack on this list that we say is stopped is verified as blocked on Windows Home, Windows Pro and Windows Enterprise — the last one is not, which is why it says so. And any child-level bypass somebody demonstrates to us is patched within fourteen days.
Four things, in the order you will meet them.
Everything below is in the first release. There is no waiting list and nothing marked coming soon.
The free tier is narrower than this: web filtering, curfews and a daily allowance on one PC. Which parts need a paid tier is set out in the pricing, plainly, rather than discovered later.
What gets blocked
You pick from twelve categories, and the choice is already made sensibly for you the moment you enter your child’s date of birth. Nothing here needs you to understand how it works.
Websites, in every browser and every app
Adult content and pornography. Gambling. Violence and gore. Drugs and alcohol. Weapons. Hate and extremism. Social media. Video streaming. Gaming. Chat and messaging. File sharing and torrents. Anonymisers, VPNs and proxies.
Known malware and phishing addresses are blocked for everybody, on every tier, and cannot be switched off. You are not asked to choose about those.
A list of your own, in both directions
Anything you want blocked that a category missed, and anything you want allowed that a category caught. Your allow list beats the category, so letting your fourteen-year-old use one particular site does not mean opening the whole category it sits in.
Programs, by name or by who made them
Choose from a catalogue of four hundred applications that we have already sorted into browsers, games, VPN clients, torrent clients, chat apps and emulators, or point at any program on the PC yourself. You can block by publisher, which catches everything that company makes, including the version that has not been released yet.
For the youngest children there is an allowed-only mode: you list what may run, and everything else does not.
Anything run out of the Downloads folder
Programs cannot be started from Downloads, from the temporary folders, from the hidden per-user folders that portable apps use, or from a USB stick. This is the single rule that does the most work, because it is where almost every get-round-your-parents guide ends up.
Installers, but politely
Windows installers are switched off for the child’s account. Anything that looks like an installer is held and turned into a request to you, rather than being killed with no explanation. A child who is trying to install something for school should get an answer, not a mystery.
Safe search, and USB sticks if you want
Safe search is forced on Google, Bing and DuckDuckGo, and YouTube is put into its restricted mode. USB mass storage can be blocked entirely; keyboards and mice carry on working.
What happens when the time runs out
Screen time is where most parental control software makes an enemy of the child and a support ticket of the parent. We have been careful here.
The screen locks. Nothing is closed.
When the allowance runs out or a curfew starts, the screen locks, in the ordinary Windows way. Nothing is closed, nothing is killed, no work is lost. A child losing an hour of homework to a screen-time limit would be our fault, not theirs.
They are warned at ten minutes, at five, and at one.
Different days, different amounts
A daily allowance per child, set separately for each day of the week, with weekdays and weekends different by default. Curfew windows outside which the PC is not usable — seven in the morning until seven at night for the under-sevens, until half past ten for the oldest band, and yours to change.
A budget inside the budget
An hour of gaming inside a three-hour day, for instance. When the gaming budget goes, the gaming stops and the rest of the time is still there for everything else.
Idle time is not charged
If they walk away and leave the PC on, the clock stops after five minutes. The allowance is time spent, not time elapsed.
Fifteen more minutes, from wherever you are
Fifteen, thirty or sixty extra minutes, granted from your phone in one tap. Because sometimes the answer is yes and you are not in the room.
What happens when your child asks for something
This is the part that does not exist in the free tools, and it is the part that decides whether the whole thing gets uninstalled in week three.
They ask, in their own words
Every block page and every blocked program offers Ask a grown-up, with room for a couple of sentences of reason. It reaches every parent device at once, as a notification.
You answer without opening anything
The notification itself carries the three answers: allow it for an hour, allow it for the rest of today, or refuse. If you open the app you can also allow it permanently, and write back.
The block lifts in about three seconds
From your tap to the site opening on their machine is normally under three seconds. Long enough that they know they asked. Short enough that they do not give up and go and do something else.
Temporary means temporary
An hour is an hour. The expiry is enforced on the PC itself, so unplugging the network does not make a temporary permission permanent.
Limits so you are not buried
Ten requests an hour at most, and once you have said no to something, no more than three asks about that same thing in a day. Refusing is allowed to mean refusing.
What you can see
Enough to know what is going on. Not enough to read your child’s life.
A feed of what was blocked
What was blocked, when, on which PC, and for which child. Anything in that list can be allowed permanently with one tap, which is how you fix the inevitable wrong block in ten seconds rather than by writing to support.
Live status of each PC
Whether it is online, how much time is left today, and which level of enforcement that edition of Windows is actually running. Windows Home cannot do everything Windows Pro can, and the console says so rather than showing you a reassuring tick.
Alerts for the handful of things that matter
The clock being changed. The DNS settings being changed. The browser extension disappearing. An account being given administrator rights. A layer of the filtering failing its own self-test. Not a stream of notifications about ordinary browsing.
A weekly summary by email
One PDF a week. For most families that and the alerts are the whole relationship with this product.
A safeguarding export, if you need one
Kinship carers and foster carers sometimes have to evidence to a local authority that reasonable protective measures are in place. A dashboard is not evidence, so there is an export that is. It is on the Family Plus tier.
The rules you set, and the page they produce.
Two surfaces, drawn to the specification rather than photographed, because there is nothing to photograph yet. The states shown are the published defaults for an eleven-to-thirteen-year-old.
It protects. It does not watch.
There is a kind of software that reads a child’s messages, photographs their screen every few seconds and records what they type. Some of it is sold to parents. It is the same software that is sold to controlling partners, and it is built the same way.
PC Guardian is not that, and it is not going to become that in version two. These five exclusions are permanent.
The five exclusions
Permanent. Not a tier, not an add-on, not later.
It does not record what your child types
No keystroke logging, anywhere, at any tier, ever. Not their passwords, not their essays, not their messages.
It does not photograph or record the screen
No screenshots, no periodic captures, no screen recording. Nobody at this company can see your child’s screen and neither can you, through this product.
It does not read messages
No email, no chat, no direct messages, no social media content. We can block the address of a chat site. We cannot read what is said on one, and we have not built anything that could.
It does not touch the microphone or the camera
The agent never opens either. There is no listen-in feature, and no secret photograph of whoever is sitting at the computer.
It does not hide
The tray icon is always visible and cannot be hidden. Right-clicking it shows your child exactly which categories are blocked, how much time is left, and what is recorded. There is no stealth mode and no hidden install, because a child who finds out later that they were watched secretly has learned something about you that we would rather they did not.
Why the boundary is there
Three reasons, and only one of them is about how it feels.
Because it is right
A child is a person. Knowing where the fence is, and being able to argue about where it should be, is part of growing up behind it. Being watched without knowing is a different thing entirely and it does different damage.
Because of what the alternative gets classified as
Software that captures content covertly is stalkerware, and the antivirus industry treats it accordingly. We assess ourselves against the Coalition Against Stalkerware criteria and we stay the right side of them. Operating visibly is the second line of that defence; not capturing content in the first place is the first.
Because the Children’s Code is law
The ICO’s Age Appropriate Design Code is a statutory code and a product like this is squarely inside it. It requires that data is minimised, that the child is told what is happening, that nothing is profiled for commercial purposes and that no nudge techniques are used. We are assessed against it before launch.
If you are the child reading this
Somebody has probably put this on your computer, or is about to. Here is the honest version, which is the same version that is on the computer itself if you right-click the little icon by the clock.
The addresses of websites you visit are recorded, and so is the time you spend on the computer, and so is anything that gets blocked. That is it. Nothing you type is recorded. Nothing on your screen is photographed. Nothing you say in a message is read. Your microphone and your camera are never switched on.
If something is blocked and you think that is wrong, there is a button that says Ask a grown-up. Use it. Requests get a straight answer, usually quickly, and asking is not held against you.
You can see who set the rules, what is blocked and how much time you have left, whenever you want, without asking anyone.
What is recorded, in full
- Website addresses — the site name, not the page and not what is on it
- Time spent on the computer today, and how much is left
- Anything that was blocked, and why it was blocked
- Requests you send, and the answers to them
- Which categories are blocked for you right now
- Who administers the rules — their first name
Five steps. You need to be an administrator on the PC once.
No Group Policy Editor. No registry. No command line. If you can set up a router you are considerably over-qualified.
Create the account
Your email address, a password, and what to call your family. Do this on any device — your phone is fine.
app.pcguardian.co.uk
Add your children
First name and date of birth, per child. The date of birth picks an age band — under seven, seven to ten, eleven to thirteen, fourteen to seventeen — and that band sets the starting rules for you.
A fourteen-year-old starts with social media, streaming, gaming and chat open, and adult content, gambling, violence, hate and extremism, torrents and VPNs closed. A seven-year-old starts with almost all of it closed. Every one of those switches is yours to change, now or at any point afterwards.
The defaults are published in full, per age band, in the console before you commit to them.
Download the installer on the PC you want to protect
The download link is inside your account, alongside a one-time setup code that ties that PC to your family. The code is good for twenty-four hours and works once.
Run it. Windows will very likely show a blue “Windows protected your PC” box first, because the installer is new and few people have downloaded it yet. Click More info: it will name the publisher as ClearCode Digital. If it says anything else, it is not ours — stop. If it does say ClearCode Digital, click Run anyway.
Windows then asks for administrator permission, and the installer asks you to paste the setup code from your account.
Under 55 MB. One administrator sign-in on the PC, once, at this step only.
Say which Windows account belongs to which child
The installer lists every account on the machine and asks you to match them up. This takes about a minute and it is the only part that requires you to think.
If a child’s account is an administrator, it offers to make them a standard account and move their files and settings across for them. Say yes. An administrator can undo most of what this product does, and the ways round it in our own bypass table stop being difficult.
If you decline, the installer makes you type out a confirmation phrase before it will continue. That is deliberate. We would rather annoy you for ten seconds than let a protected machine quietly not be one.
Accounts that are not mapped to anybody are blocked from signing in, so there is no spare account left over.
Install the app on your phone and sign in
The PC appears as protected. Requests from your children arrive as notifications you can answer without opening the app, from wherever you happen to be.
If there are two of you, add the other parent. Requests go to both phones and either of you can answer.
Ten minutes, and we have to prove it
PC Guardian does not ship until five non-technical testers have each done all five of those steps unaided, on a clean Windows 11 Home machine, in under ten minutes. It is written into the release criteria alongside the security tests. If they cannot, it is not ready, and the answer is to fix the installer rather than to write a longer help page.
Three tiers. One of them is free and stays free.
We are Windows only, and every product we are compared against is cross-platform. It would be absurd to charge what they charge for narrower coverage, so we do not.
Prices in pounds sterling. Unlimited children on every paid tier — we are not charging you per child in a product about protecting children.
Free
One PC, one child, indefinitely.
£0 a month
- Web filtering across every browser and application — Included
- All twelve categories, plus malware and phishing blocking — Included
- Curfews and a daily time allowance — Included
- App, installer and Downloads-folder blockingNot included
- The ask-a-grown-up request workflowNot included
- Phone appNot included
- Activity feed, alerts and the weekly reportNot included
Recommended the 14-day trial is of this tier
Family — recommended tier
The whole product, for a household.
£3.49 a month
or £29.95 a year, which is £11.93 less than twelve months at the monthly price.
- Everything in Free — Included
- Up to five Windows PCs on one set of rules — Included
- App blocking by name, by publisher and by folder — Included
- Installer blocking and USB blocking — Included
- Ask a grown-up, answered from your phone in two taps — Included
- Per-app time budgets and one-tap extensions — Included
- Activity feed, real-time alerts, weekly PDF by email — Included
- Phone app for both parents — Included
- Safeguarding export for local authoritiesFamily Plus only
No card. It does not become a subscription unless you decide it does.
Family Plus
Kinship carers, foster carers, and larger households.
£5.49 a month
or £49.95 a year, which is £15.93 less than twelve months at the monthly price.
- Everything in Family — Included
- Up to ten Windows PCs — Included
- Safeguarding report you can hand to a local authority — Included
- Priority support — Included
- Phase two capability on release, at no increase — Included
The trial is of Family. Move up whenever you like.
Protection is never withdrawn for non-payment
If a card expires, or a payment fails, or you decide to stop paying, the filtering does not stop. The agent drops to the free tier and keeps filtering. You lose the management features, not the protection.
This is a rule in the requirements document with a test against it, not a line in an advert. Holding a child’s safety hostage to a failed direct debit is not a business we are willing to be in.
Fourteen days, no card
The trial is the full Family tier for fourteen days and it does not ask for a card. There is nothing to cancel and no subscription waiting at the end of it. If you do nothing, you drop to the free tier and the filtering carries on.
Paying by the year
A year costs about nine months of the monthly price on both paid tiers. The discount is deliberately steep, because a family that commits in September is a family that is still protected in February.
No lifetime licence
We do not sell one. The category lists have to be rebuilt every night and the bypass work never finishes, so a one-off payment would be a promise we could not keep. We would rather not take the money than take it on that basis.
What it is compared with
Qustodio’s entry plan was £39.95 a year for five devices when we checked in August 2026, and it covers Windows, Mac, iOS and Android. Ours is £29.95 a year for five devices and covers Windows only.
That is the whole trade, stated plainly. We are cheaper because we do less ground, and we go deeper on the ground we do cover. If you need your child’s phone covered, we are not the answer and you should buy one of them.
How payment is handled
Card payments go to Stripe. We never see or store your card details, and Stripe holds parent details only. Nothing about your children goes anywhere near a payment processor.
What it cannot do.
Written out properly, because you are going to find out anyway and it is better that you find out now.
It is Windows only
It protects Windows PCs. It does nothing at all for a phone, a tablet, an iPad, a Nintendo Switch, an Xbox, a PlayStation or a smart TV. If your child does most of their internet on a phone, this product solves a small part of your problem and you should know that before you pay for it.
There is no macOS version and no phone version today, and we are not going to imply that one is around the corner.
It is not antivirus
We block the addresses of known malware and phishing sites, which stops a good deal of trouble before it starts. We do not scan files, we do not examine what is already on the machine, and we do not remove anything. Keep your antivirus. Microsoft Defender is included with Windows and is fine.
It does not stop an adult with a USB stick
Someone who boots the PC from other media and edits Windows from outside it can disable this, and we say so in the bypass table above rather than in a footnote. It is designed against a curious child with a search engine, which is the actual threat in almost every household. It is not designed against a determined adult with physical access, and no software installed inside Windows can be.
The category lists are good, not perfect
We use free, public, well-maintained blocklists plus five thousand sites we have classified by hand. We do not license a commercial feed and we are not going to, because the per-family cost of one would come straight out of the price you pay.
The honest consequence is that our coverage of social media, gaming and streaming is not as complete as a paid feed’s. Something will get through a category you thought was closed. Blocking it is one tap from your feed, we take miscategorisation reports from parents, and a correction reaches every PC within seventy-two hours.
It will block something it should not have
A category is a broad instrument and a blunt rule about the Downloads folder is a blunter one. At some point this product will block a homework site, a school portal or a game your child is allowed. That is not a bug report, it is Tuesday.
Which is why allowing something takes one tap from the feed on your phone, and why the block page has a button for your child to ask instead of a dead end.
Windows Home cannot enforce as strongly as Windows Pro
Windows Pro has application control built into the operating system. Home does not, so on Home we do the work ourselves, by watching what starts and stopping what should not. It is effective, and it is not identical.
The console tells you which of the three levels your PC is actually running rather than showing you a tick that means nothing. Most family PCs are Home, and this product was designed for Home first.
We hold no special protection from Microsoft
Some security software runs with a level of self-protection that Windows grants only to members of a Microsoft antimalware programme. We are not a member of it, we do not have that protection, and you will not find us implying otherwise anywhere.
What resists tampering here is the list in the bypass table: the permissions on the service, the two services restarting each other, registration to start in Safe Mode, and your child using a standard Windows account. That is the whole of it.
It is not for schools
This is a product for a household. We do not sell to schools, we do not offer managed deployment, and if the laptop belongs to a school you should be talking to them and not to us.
It is not a substitute for the conversation
Software can hold a boundary. It cannot explain why the boundary is there, and it cannot tell when a child is old enough to move it. Every family that gets this right does the talking as well. We have built the fence, not the parenting.
The things people ask before they install it.
If your question is not here, write to us and we will answer it, and then it will be here.
Will my child know it is there?
Yes, and that is deliberate. The icon sits by the clock and cannot be hidden. Right-clicking it shows your child which categories are blocked, how much screen time is left today, that website addresses are recorded, that what they type and what is on their screen is not, how to ask for something, and your first name as the person who sets the rules.
There is no stealth mode and there never will be. Software that hides itself from the person it is running on is a different category of product, and it is the category antivirus vendors quarantine.
Can they uninstall it?
No. Uninstalling asks for your PIN and checks it with us before anything is removed. If the PC has no internet at the time, it will take a one-time code from your phone app instead. Five wrong attempts locks the prompt for half an hour.
They also cannot stop the service, disable it in the Services panel, get round it by booting into Safe Mode, or remove the browser extension. All of that depends on their Windows account being a standard account rather than an administrator, which the installer sets up with you at the start.
Does it work on their phone?
No. It protects Windows PCs and nothing else. Not phones, not tablets, not consoles, not smart TVs.
One related thing that does work: if your child tethers the PC to their phone to use mobile data, the PC is still filtered. It is the PC we protect, not your broadband. The phone itself remains uncovered.
What happens if the internet goes down?
Everything carries on. The last set of rules is held on the PC in an encrypted file and stays enforced with no time limit. Screen time still counts down, curfews still apply, and a permission you granted for an hour still expires after an hour.
What stops is changes reaching the machine. A new rule you set, or a request your child sends, waits until the PC is back online. If a PC goes quiet for thirty minutes we tell you.
What do you do with the information it collects?
We store the address of a site that was visited or blocked, the time, which child, which PC and what happened. We do not store the page, the content, the search terms typed into a box, or anything that was said in a message, because none of that is ever captured in the first place.
It is kept on our own infrastructure in the United Kingdom. Activity is deleted after ninety days automatically. The record of rule changes and decisions is kept for two years. You can set both shorter. Neither can be set longer.
Nothing is sold, nothing is shared, and nothing is profiled for any commercial purpose. Two companies outside the UK touch anything at all: Stripe, which takes the payment, and Expo, which delivers notifications to your phone. Both hold parent details only and neither receives anything about a child.
What if it blocks something it should not?
It will, sooner or later. A category is a broad instrument.
Your child sees a page telling them what was blocked and why, with a button to ask you about it. You get a notification and can allow it for an hour, for the day, or permanently, without opening anything. From your feed, anything that was blocked can be allowed with one tap.
If we have a site in the wrong category, tell us. Corrections go into the nightly list build and reach every PC within seventy-two hours, for every family, not just yours.
Does it read their messages, or record what they type?
No. No keystroke logging, no screenshots, no screen recording, no reading of email, chat or direct messages, no microphone, no camera. Not on any tier, not as an add-on, not later.
We can block the address of a chat site. We cannot see a word of what is said on one, and there is nothing in the product that could be switched on to make us able to.
What happens if I stop paying?
The filtering keeps running. Your account drops to the free tier, you lose the management features, and one PC stays filtered on the last rules you set. We do not switch off a child’s protection because a card expired.
Will it slow the PC down?
It is built to strict limits: under eight milliseconds added to a typical web address lookup, under half a percent of a four-core processor when nothing is happening, and under ninety megabytes of memory for both background services together.
In practice the thing you might notice is a fraction of a second on a lookup the first time, and nothing after that. The installer is under fifty-five megabytes.
My child is an administrator on the PC. Does that matter?
It matters a great deal, and the installer will not let it pass quietly. It offers to create a standard account for them and move their files and settings across, which takes a minute and changes nothing they will notice day to day.
If you decline, the installer makes you type out a confirmation phrase first. An administrator can undo most of what this product does, and several of the attacks in the bypass table stop being difficult.
I am a kinship or foster carer and have to evidence what I have put in place. Can this help?
Yes. That was one of the three people this product was designed around. As well as the dashboard there is an exportable report you can hand to a local authority, showing what was in place and when, rather than a screenshot of an app.
It is on the Family Plus tier, at £49.95 a year.
Can both of us manage it?
Yes. Add the other parent or carer to the family and requests reach both phones. Either of you can answer, and every decision is recorded with the name of whoever made it.
Can I put it on a school laptop?
If the laptop belongs to the school, ask the school. Their device, their rules, and it will very likely already be managed by them. We build for households and we do not sell to schools.
How technical do I need to be?
Not at all. There is no Group Policy Editor, no registry, nothing typed into a black window. Set-up is five steps and we do not release a version until five non-technical testers have each finished it unaided in under ten minutes.
Which versions of Windows?
Windows 10 from version 21H2 onwards, and Windows 11. Home, Pro, Enterprise and Education, on both Intel and ARM machines. Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 are not supported and will not be.