My daughter, Rehansa, was four. I was driving her to her ballet class - a little studio called Tiny Tutus Ballet - when she asked if I could put on her favourite song from class. Without thinking twice, I said "sure, darling," asked which one it was, and played it. It was Taio Cruz, "Dynamite."
Here’s the part that still gets me: I knew that song. I’d loved it ten or fifteen years earlier, back when it was on every radio station and in every club. So when she asked for it, checking the lyrics never once crossed my mind. A song you already know feels like a song you’ve already vetted. It isn’t.
What I didn’t realise was that the version her class danced to was the radio edit. The one I’d just played in the car was not. I reached for the volume a few beats too late, and spent the rest of that drive wishing I’d checked before I hit play.
"There has to be a better way than reading a lyrics website at a red light."
So before she asked for the next song, I checked it. Word by word. I even printed some of the lyrics out to be completely sure they were clean. After a few evenings of that, it was obvious there had to be a faster, more reliable way - one that didn’t depend on me getting it right by hand every single time.
That’s what KidSafeTube grew into.
Every default is configurable. Every category can be turned off. We disagree with some of our own defaults - and we make them defaults anyway because most parents want them. Yours can be different.
We don’t replace pop with lullabies. We find clean radio edits, suggest similar-vibe alternatives, and only block when there is no reasonable way to keep the song.
No selling data. No advertising on kid profiles. Listening history deleted on 30-day rolling window. COPPA compliance pending ahead of launch. Full-deletion in one click.
Every block comes with a reason. Every flag shows the line that caused it. Every miss gets a "report this" button. We don’t hand-wave with vibes - we show our work.
The Free plan stays free. We will never bait-and-switch features that families relied on into a paid tier. Things we add to paid plans will be net-new.
We’re a family, not a call centre. Email us - you’ll hear back from one of us, not a chatbot. Usually within a day.
We’d rather support one platform properly than five badly. YouTube works today; Spotify and the rest say "coming soon" until they actually do. No vaporware on the pricing page, no features that only exist in the screenshots.
This started with one four-year-old and a song in the car. Every feature still has to pass the only test that matters - would we use it on our own family, tonight, on the drive to class?
A radio-edit favourite turns out not to be so radio-edit on the drive to ballet class. The first "screening tool" is a parent checking lyrics by hand - and printing some out to be sure.
The printed lyric sheet becomes a small tool that scans a YouTube link and flags the words that matter.
A hand-written list of "things I do not want played" turns into a real set of categories: profanity, sexual content, violence, drugs, and the mature themes most tools ignore entirely.
A five-year-old and a nine-year-old do not need the same filter. Per-child profiles go in, so the same song can pass for one and stop for the other.
Checking one track at a time was never the point. Whole-playlist scanning goes in, because nobody has time to paste forty links.
Still a family operation, still checking songs so other families don’t have to. KidSafeTube opens on 30 September 2026, starting with YouTube. Spotify is next.
None of this is theoretical to us. We test every release on the people we built it for - our own kids.
Dad, driver, and the one who learned the hard way that the radio edit and the album cut are not the same song. Builds the thing so no other parent has to read lyrics at a red light.
Eight years old and brutally honest. If a song is boring, he will tell you. If it has a word it shouldn't, he already noticed.
Five years old and the main character of this whole operation. The ballet-class song that started it all was hers. Approves playlists one twirl at a time.