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A parent and a primary-school-age child sitting close on a sofa, sharing an older phone the child is holding.

Messaging, built for families

The connection you want for your child.
None of the stuff you don't.

Shoal lets your kids stay in touch — with you, extended family and their close friends. No strangers, no feeds, no open internet: just the people you've chosen, on a device they've already got.

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Free for 90 days. No ads, no data sold, ever. See pricing

How Shoal works

Three rules that change everything else.

Choose a rule to explore

  1. A walled garden by design

    Your children only talk to people you've approved. No discovery, no DMs from strangers, no friend-of-a-friend creep. If they're not on the list, they can't get through.

  2. Time limits and schedules, set per child

    Chat has a clear beginning and end. Different rules for weekdays, weekends, and school holidays. No notifications outside the window, no late-night scrolling.

  3. Cross-family chats need both sides to say yes

    When kids want to chat with friends from other families, both sets of family admins have to approve it. The conversation is then visible to family admins on either side.

The bigger idea

A messaging app that lets a smartphone stay dumb.

Staying close to family and friends is part of growing up — the open internet, social feeds, and stranger DMs that come bundled with a smartphone aren't. Shoal gives your child a real messaging app for the people you've chosen together, so an old phone becomes a way to stay in touch and nothing else.

Read the smartphone-free story

Skins

An interface that grows with your child.

Shoal isn't one app with a kids' mode bolted on. Choose a skin for each child and the whole interface changes — what they see, what they can do, how much reading it asks of them — while everyone stays in the same conversations.

Pre-reading

Reef

For kids who can't read yet.

Reef strips messaging back to what a child who can't read yet can use on their own: big tappable faces, voice notes, video, and calls. No keyboard, nothing to type. And when a parent sends a written message, Reef reads it aloud — so a pre-reader hears “on my way to get you” instead of staring at words they can't decode yet.

Reading on their own

Cove

For readers who don't need training wheels.

Cove works much like the standard app — your child reads and types like everyone else — with a few quiet differences sized for this stage. The one you'll notice first is Take a moment: if a message trips a word you've flagged, Cove shows a soft “Take a moment?” prompt before it sends. It's a nudge, not a block — one tap sends anyway — so it builds the pause instead of policing it.

Teens & grown-ups

Ocean

The full app, for the people running it.

Ocean is the complete Shoal interface — every conversation, every control, family oversight and settings, the lot. It’s what teenagers and adults use, and the baseline the younger skins are shaped from.

It works in both directions: a parent's typed message can be spoken aloud for a child too young to read it, and a child's voice note can be transcribed for a parent who can't listen right now. The same conversation, met where each person is.

What's in the app

The features we built Shoal for.

We've built the ordinary parts of a messaging app well. The extraordinary parts — the ones below — are what made us build Shoal in the first place.

Choose a feature to preview
Multiple families, one account

Belong to as many families as your life requires. Switch between them with a tap.

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Skins

One app, shaped to fit each child — a voice-and-video interface for pre-readers, a fuller one for confident readers, and the standard app for teens and grown-ups. Everyone stays in the same conversations.

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Children without an email address

Children don't need an email or a password to use Shoal. A family admin adds them to the family, and they appear in the picker on every family device.

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Family devices

A family admin signs in on a shared phone or tablet, marks it as a family device, and the children in the family can use it to chat.

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Admin oversight, by design

Family admins can see children's conversations because the cryptography is built that way — not because of a back door.

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Time limits and schedules

Set the hours when chat is available — different rules for weekdays, weekends, and school holidays — so screen time has a clear beginning and end.

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Cross-Family Conversations

Two children can chat across families — when both sets of family admins say yes.

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Optional moderation

Block links, block or flag specific words — set per child, off by default. A second layer alongside admin oversight, only when you want it.

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And of course, all the things you'd expect from a messaging app — voice notes, voice and video calls, read receipts, push notifications, offline support, install-anywhere. See the full feature list

When Shoal makes sense

Whose conversations is Shoal for?

All use cases

Questions families ask

Frequently asked questions

What age range is Shoal for?

Shoal is built for the years before a first smartphone — from kids who can't read yet through to early teens. Rather than fix an age, you choose a skin that fits where your child is: a voice-and-video interface for pre-readers, a fuller one for confident readers, and the standard app for teens. A child can move between skins as they grow, and there's no enforced minimum.

Does my child need their own phone to use Shoal?

No. Shoal works on any device with a browser — a shared family tablet, an old phone with the SIM removed, or a laptop. You can pair a device to a child without giving them an account or an email address.

Do my child's friends need to be on Shoal too?

For your child to chat with a friend, yes — that friend's family also needs a Shoal account, and both sides' family admins need to approve the connection. There's no SMS bridge to non-Shoal users. That's the trade-off for the walled garden.

What happens when my child outgrows Shoal?

You cancel, or pause if there's a younger sibling who'll need it in a few years. Shoal is built for the years before a teenager wants their own real phone — we don't try to keep teens on a parental-oversight app forever.

Is Shoal end-to-end encrypted?

Messages are encrypted on the sending device and decrypted on the recipients' devices, and in normal operation nothing we run reads your conversations. Family admins can read children's conversations because their keys are wrapped into the conversation at creation, not because we have a back door. There is one architectural caveat, and we don't paper over it — the fuller picture is on the security page.

Will my child get notifications outside the chat windows?

No. Outside the windows you've set, push notifications are suppressed and the app doesn't show new messages on that child's device until the next window opens.

Start using Shoal with your family.

Try Shoal free for 90 days. Sign in with email, Google, or Apple, create a family, and invite the people who matter.

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