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The KiVio Parents' Playbook

An honest, step-by-step guide to using KiVio — a children's video platform built from the ground up to be ad-free, age-aware, and pay-only-for-what-you-watch. Written for parents who care about where their kids' attention goes.

1. Why KiVio exists

You already know the problem. You hand your kid an iPad for ten minutes and twenty-two minutes later they're on their fourth autoplay — surrounded by targeted ads, surveillance tracking, and a feed designed by engagement engineers to be impossible to put down.

Every "kids app" we tried had the same pattern: free upfront, your child's attention becomes the product. YouTube Kids runs ads with questionable targeting; TikTok has no real safety floor; Netflix Kids is just whatever the adults picked for the month. None of them are built for your kid — they're built for scale.

KiVio is the opposite. We charge a small, obvious amount per episode. We know nothing personal about your child. We let you cap monthly spend. We moderate everything with AI before a single pixel reaches a kid, and we actively route attention toward real human creators and away from infinite autoplay.

2. KiVio vs YouTube Kids, TikTok, Netflix Kids

The spiritual difference is simple: everyone else monetizes attention; KiVio monetizes episodes. You know exactly what you paid for, and your kid learns that each piece of content was made by a real person who got paid because you watched it.

3. How we protect kids

• Zero PII on child accounts. A child account carries no name, no email, no birthday — just an age tier the parent sets. Nothing a leak could expose, nothing an advertiser could target.
• Three-tier autonomous moderation at upload. Every video a creator submits goes through visual content moderation (AWS Rekognition), audio moderation + full transcript analysis (AssemblyAI), and an AI-origin classifier that confirms the content is animated, not live-action. Anything that fails any gate is rejected before a kid ever sees it.
• Age tiers are enforced server-side, not client-side. A tampered app can't ask the server for AGES_10_PLUS content on a child account tagged AGES_3_5 — the filter lives in our database query, not in the app.
• Signed-URL streaming. Every paid episode is served through short-lived signed CloudFront URLs. There's no public URL to a paid video that could be copy-pasted into a chat.
• No social features for kids. Comments, DMs, and the ability to be contacted by any outside account are all adults-only. A kid in the KiVio app sees content, follows series, and reacts — they cannot message anyone or be messaged.
• No infinite autoplay. Series are explicitly finite — the creator declares the total episode count at creation. When a series ends, it ends.

4. The direct-pay coin economy

KiVio uses an internal unit called a coin. One coin equals one US cent (1¢). You buy coin bundles in your parent dashboard; your kids spend coins to unlock paid episodes.

Of each coin a creator earns:

• 70% goes to the creator who made the video.
• 30% stays with KiVio, which pays for the moderation pipeline, CDN, Stripe fees, and the engineering that keeps everything else working.

Creator earnings sit in a 14-day chargeback-safety hold, then move to their available balance for payout to their own bank through Stripe. If you ever dispute a charge, the funds flow back cleanly — no creator is paid for a sale that got reversed.

5. Coin → dollar converter

Type any number of coins to see what it costs in dollars and how much ends up with the creator.

6. Signing up as a parent

1. Open kidsaivideo.com/parent. Sign up with email + password or Google.
2. Verify your email. KiVio needs a verified parent email before any purchase can happen — this is also a COPPA posture, since a verified parent is the only legal signal a child's account should exist at all.
3. Accept the Terms and Privacy Policy. We timestamp your consent on your parent row (not your kid's).

7. Adding a child + what we store

From the Family dashboard, click + Add child. You'll be asked for two things:

• Age tier: 3–5, 6–9, or 10+. This is a bucket, not a birthday — we don't need the specific day your kid was born.
• Monthly allowance in coins: a hard cap on how much this child can spend per 30-day window.

That's it. We store:

If you added a child today and we got breached tomorrow, the attacker would learn an anonymous bucket like "AGES_6_9 with 500 coins allowance" — nothing that could identify your real child.

8. Why age tiers matter

Every uploaded video goes through moderation and gets tagged with an age tier (3–5, 6–9, or 10+). The child's own tier is a ceiling: a kid set to 6–9 sees 3–5 and 6–9 content; a kid set to 10+ sees everything. A 3–5 child never sees 10+ content, no matter what the client requests.

The filter lives in our database query, not in the mobile app. There's no "developer tools" trick that bypasses it.

9. Allowance vs wallet: how the money actually works

KiVio uses one wallet (yours) and one cap per child (their allowance). They look like two balances but they're one amount:

1. Your wallet. You buy coins with Stripe. The coins sit on your parent balance. Nobody else can touch them.
2. Each child's allowance. A monthly cap in coins. When your kid taps "unlock" on a paid episode, the server runs two checks in one transaction:
   • Does the parent have enough coins to cover this spend? (Debits your wallet.)
   • Will this spend keep the kid under their monthly allowance? (Bumps the kid's spent-this-period counter.)
   If either check fails, nothing happens. Both commit together or neither does.

This design means: you can't accidentally be "out of coins on one kid's balance while another kid still has them." There's one real pot. Allowances are limits, not sub-wallets.

10. Buying coins

1. On the Family dashboard, scroll to the Wallet card.
2. Pick a bundle. Common sizes: 100 coins ($1), 500 coins ($5), 2000 coins ($20).
3. Click Buy. You're redirected to Stripe Checkout. Pay once; we never store your card.
4. Stripe sends us a confirmation; coins land on your wallet within seconds. Occasionally the webhook is slow — see section 18 for the Sync button.

No subscription, no auto-renew, no "free trial that charges you after 7 days." You buy coins when you want them; what's left when your family stops using KiVio stays yours (we won't expire it).

11. The 3-part handoff code

Your kid's mobile app has to sign them in. Instead of asking a 6-year-old to type an email and password (COPPA concern + practical awful), we use a one-time code.

1. In your parent dashboard, pick the kid and click Generate code.
2. We mint a 3-part code like HJK-392-TBR. It's short enough to read out loud, hard to guess, and expires in 10 minutes.
3. Open the KiVio app on the kid's device. Enter the code.
4. The app exchanges it for a kid-only session token. Done — your kid is signed in.

The code is single-use: once your kid's phone redeems it, it's gone. A stolen code expires fast and can only ever sign in the specific child it was minted for.

12. The in-app flow for your kid

What your kid sees once they're signed in:

1. Flow tab — a vertical reel of short free clips (the first 30% of every series is free). This is where discovery happens; no coins come out of your wallet here.
2. Home — browse-first catalog: series rails, categories, top creators.
3. When they tap into a series and reach the first paid episode, they see a lock card: "This episode costs 2 coins to unlock. You have X coins. Tap to unlock, or ask a grown-up."
4. If they have the coins and want to spend, they tap once. Two coins come off your wallet, two coins get recorded on their monthly allowance counter, 1.4 coins credit to the creator, 0.6 coins credit to KiVio. The episode plays. Watched once, owned forever — the kid can replay it any time without re-spending.
5. If they're short on coins or the series is 10+ and they're 6–9, the lock card routes them to the "ask a grown-up" flow instead of letting them spend.

13. Teaching screen-time value, not infinite scroll

This is the part that matters most to parents and the part that no competitor is set up to do.

On KiVio, your kid internalizes three things that no ad-driven kids app can teach:

1. Their time has a cost. Two coins doesn't sound like much to an adult, but to a 7-year-old with a 500-coin monthly allowance, "spending" is an actual choice. They start noticing which series are worth it. That's the beginning of value judgment about media — a skill the YouTube feed actively prevents them from developing.
2. Content comes from people. Every creator has a public profile. When your kid unlocks an episode, 70% of what they just spent goes to the human who animated it. Over time they start recognizing creators, favoriting them, and understanding "this person made that for me." Media stops being an infinite tap and starts being a conversation.
3. Series end. No autoplay-another-random-thing-forever. When a series finishes, it finishes. The screen doesn't try to hold your kid for another 40 minutes with increasingly weirder recommendations.

14. Tipping a creator you love

Right next to every creator's name on their public profile is a Tip creator button. One-way, from your wallet to theirs.

1. Open the creator's profile.
2. Click Tip creator. Enter an amount in coins and (optionally) a short regard message — "we loved the rocket baker series, keep going." 140 characters, like a postcard.
3. Submit. The coins come out of your wallet, 70% land in the creator's pending escrow, your note shows up on their Studio inbox.

Tips are anonymous. The creator sees the note but not your email or any identifying info — they just know someone appreciated the work. Browsing creator pages is anonymous too: nobody tracks that you looked.

Tips go through the same 14-day escrow as a paid unlock, same chargeback protection.

15. Commissioning a custom cartoon

This is where KiVio does something no other kids platform does. You can message any creator directly and ask them to make a one-off cartoon for your family — a birthday song, a surprise, a story starring your kid's favorite stuffed animal.

1. Open a creator's profile and click Message creator. A direct-message thread opens.
2. Click Request a custom cartoon. Fill in:
   • A brief ("my daughter Mia loves penguins and ice cream — can you make a 30-second birthday cartoon?")
   • An offered coin amount.
   • Optionally, the kid's name for context.
3. Submit. The creator sees the proposal in their chat and can accept, counter with a different price, or reject.
4. If they counter, you see the counter in the same thread. Click Accept & pay to lock in. The coins come out of your wallet right now and are held by KiVio — not paid to the creator yet.
5. The creator makes the video. They have up to 14 days. If they miss that window and never deliver, you can cancel for a full automatic refund — no admin needed.
6. When they deliver, you get notified in the chat. You can watch the video privately before confirming. If it's great, click Confirm & release — the coins pay out to the creator immediately, no 14-day hold.
7. If something's wrong, open a dispute. An admin reviews the brief, the delivery, and your complaint, and decides the refund-vs-payout split — full refund, partial refund, or full payout to the creator, case by case.

16. Private vs public commissions

The creator picks a bucket when they organize their series. You see the result:

If you want strict family-only, pick a creator who marked their commission series as Private. Public is the default assumption; you don't accidentally end up with a surprise shared.

17. Can parents watch too?

Yes — on the web, you have a Watch mode that lets you binge the full catalog yourself. Paid episodes still cost coins and the coins come out of your wallet (not your kid's allowance). You're a full viewer, not a bypass account.

Why a parent would want this: previewing a series before letting your kid at it, or just because some KiVio animation is genuinely great to watch with your kid as a shared activity.

18. Coins not showing after a purchase? Sync with Stripe

99% of the time, coins land in your wallet within a second of Stripe charging your card. Occasionally a Stripe webhook arrives late or gets dropped. In those cases:

1. Open the Wallet card on your parent dashboard.
2. Click Missing coins? Sync with Stripe.
3. We walk the last 48 hours of your paid Stripe sessions and credit anything the webhook didn't land. Safe to click as many times as you want — we can't double-credit the same session.

19. Support, tickets, and reaching the founder

At the bottom of your parent dashboard is a Support form. Use it for:

• A bug or something that didn't behave the way the dashboard said it would.
• A content concern — if your kid saw something you don't think should have been on the platform.
• A refund request where the auto-flow didn't apply (partial dispute, etc).
• A feature idea.
• Reaching the founder — we read every ticket. Yes, really. Headcount is small; the ticket queue is still a person.

You can also submit a video for admin review from the share page: there's a 🚩 Report button on every video. Admins review the queue daily and decide to approve the deletion (and refund affected unlocks case-by-case) or reject it with a note.

Create your family account →

Last updated 2026-11-02. We rev this page when something in the parent dashboard changes.