Why we are doing this
The honest answer is that the question would not leave us alone. We watched friends and siblings hand tablets and phones to seven-year-olds, and we watched the parental control market answer that need with software that felt designed for a courtroom rather than a kitchen — checklists, alarming dashboards, weekly fights about screen time, and the unmistakable feeling of a family that no longer trusts each other.
We thought, for a long time, that surely a better version existed. We tried Bark. We tried Qustodio. We tried Family Link. Each one felt like a partial answer with a wrong tone — too loud, too American, too punitive, or too quiet to be useful. None of them used a modern AI to read the way a thoughtful adult reads. None of them treated a fourteen-year-old with the dignity of being a person.
So we are building the version we wished existed when our own children were that age — and the version a parent in Istanbul, São Paulo, Berlin, or Mumbai can use without being told, in effect, that the only acceptable version of childhood is the American suburban one.
The team
CalmKin is being built by a small founding team with experience across consumer applications, language models, child safeguarding, and design. We will introduce ourselves properly at public launch — for now we are heads-down on the product itself.
We work with a small board of advisors that includes child psychologists, paediatricians who specialise in adolescent mental health, a former content moderation lead from a major platform, and parents from each of the eight first-launch countries. Their fingerprints are on every alert we will ever send.
How we think about money
CalmKin will be a paid product. We chose this on purpose. A free family-safety product makes its money in one of two ways — selling data or upselling fear — and we will never do either. We will charge a calm monthly price (roughly $10–15) that lets us pay engineers, pay clinicians, run the language model, and answer parents in a crisis at three in the morning.
Founding families lock in a permanent founding rate. School and pediatric-clinic partnerships have separate, transparent pricing. We are not chasing hyper-growth. We would rather serve fifty thousand families well than five million families badly.
Where we will not go
CalmKin will not build hidden monitoring. CalmKin will not sell your data. CalmKin will not partner with insurance companies that price family premiums based on alert frequency. CalmKin will not build a surveillance tool for spouses, employers, or governments. The day we are tempted by any of those is the day we owe you a refund and a public apology.
Get in touch
We answer email at hello@calmkinai.com. Press at press@calmkinai.com. School and clinic partnerships at partnerships@calmkinai.com. Privacy and security at privacy@calmkinai.com. A real person reads each one.