Nightlight is family intelligence that lives on your Mac. It reads your child’s messages there — and only there, turns them into a calm evening brief on how their day actually went, and alerts you the moment something serious appears.
Private alpha, macOS on Apple Silicon. We’ll email you an invite — nothing else.
Below is a complete sample brief for a fictional 13-year-old, exactly as it would land in your inbox at 8 PM. Tap a section — most parents go straight to Safety.
Like a readiness score for your kid's week. Nightlight distills the whole day into a single 0–100 Pulse reading — measured against your child's own normal, never a comparison to other kids. It rises and falls with real changes, so you can see a rough patch coming and a good stretch building, at a glance.
It's a conversation starter, not a report card. The score is built from what's already in the brief — connection, tone, balance, rhythm — so when it dips, the digest tells you why, in plain words. It's for texture. Anything genuinely urgent never waits for a score — that's an immediate alert.
And it starts fast. Pulse learns your child's baseline in the first five days — you watch it calibrate day by day — then keeps sharpening for two weeks.
Nightlight lives on the Mac your child messages from. A guided setup walks you through permissions and introduces the idea to your child — openness is part of the design.
A private AI model runs on the Mac itself. It reads the day’s messages right there, understands tone and context, and writes a short brief. No cloud. No uploads. No exceptions.
One warm email at a time you choose: how the day went, who they talked to, anything worth knowing. Serious safety concerns don’t wait for the evening — they alert you immediately.
We can’t read your child’s messages. Neither can anyone else.
That isn’t a policy — it’s the architecture. The messages are read and understood by an AI model running on your own machine. What reaches you is a summary written on that Mac and sent from that Mac.
A clear, readable brief on the day — tone, topics, and insights: the conversations that mattered and the small bright spots you’d otherwise miss.
Signs of self-harm, grooming, sexual content, or violence page you immediately. Everything below that — bullying, substances, secrecy — stays in the evening brief, where it belongs.
When someone new starts messaging your child, you’ll know — with context, not panic.
Nightlight works best when your child knows it’s there. Setup includes a family agreement you go through together — no secrets, that’s the deal.
The calm daily brief is where almost everything belongs. But if a message shows signs of something serious, you don’t wait until 8 PM — you’re alerted immediately, any hour, day or night, with the context to act. Like everything else, it’s caught on your Mac.
The evening brief weaves together the signals that actually describe a kid’s day. Sources roll out one at a time, and every one obeys the same rule: read on your Mac, understood on your Mac, uploaded nowhere.
Tone, topics, and the conversations that mattered — including when someone new starts messaging your child. Summaries, never transcripts.
Not a stopwatch — insight. How much, on what, and when: the school-night scroll that ends past midnight, the balance between games and homework, and how screen patterns line up with mood and sleep. The brief connects “2h 10m today, down from their average” to how the day actually felt.
Where their curiosity went — the channels they trust, and the late-night search worth a gentle check-in.
Music as an emotional signal: the breakup song on repeat Thursday night tells you something a chart never will.
Rest and movement give the brief its context — better sleep and a lighter mood usually travel together, and Nightlight says so plainly.
No — and the difference is structural, not cosmetic. Spy apps copy your child’s private life to a company’s servers and show you all of it. Nightlight never moves the messages anywhere, shows you a summary rather than a transcript, and is designed to be used with your child’s knowledge. You stay close; they keep their privacy.
That’s up to you, but we designed for openness and recommend it strongly. Setup includes a family agreement written for kids, and research (and common sense) says monitoring works better as a shared understanding than a secret.
Your account email, billing status, and app-health signals (version, last successful run). That’s it. There are no endpoints that accept message content, so it can’t leak, be subpoenaed from us, or appear in a breach — we never have it.
A Mac with Apple Silicon (M1 or newer) that your child messages from, running macOS 26 or later, with about 10 GB free for the private AI models — 16 GB of memory recommended. The AI runs locally, so no extra hardware and no per-message fees. The installer confirms the chip and macOS version before anything is installed.
The alpha covers iMessage and Screen Time today. Watching & searching, listening, and health & sleep are rolling out one at a time — each held to the same rule: read locally, summarize locally, upload nothing. The “what feeds the brief” section above shows exactly what each adds to the evening email.
Everywhere except Germany and Austria for now — their laws around family monitoring deserve careful legal review before we offer Nightlight there. The product is currently English-only; more languages are on the roadmap.
The alpha is free for invited families. At launch: a 10-day free trial, then $14/month or $120/year for the whole household — no per-message metering, no tiers of your child’s safety.
No cropping, no highlights reel — this is the full length of what arrives every evening, written on your Mac by your Mac. Use the numbered guide to jump around.
Family intelligence, written on your Mac: a calm brief every evening, alerts only when something needs you — and nothing ever leaves the machine.
Join the alpha