The plan that goes on top of parental controls. Every app and every freedom on your child's phone gets a date, a reason you can say out loud, and a signature from both sides.
Printable, nothing saved, no sign-up. It is yours whether or not you ever install anything.
Most advice about children and phones is written for the day the phone is handed over. That is not when most people go looking for help. They go looking in the middle of an argument about Snapchat, two years after the phone arrived, when the rules have quietly stopped meaning anything.
If that is you, nothing here starts by taking things away. A plan that opens by confiscating does not get signed, and one that is not signed is just a parent talking.
Already gave them the phone? The plan, week by week, from where you are
A ladder. Each app and freedom sits on a step with a date attached, and some steps have a short session to do first — not a test, and not something a child can fail.
That is the default pace. There is a slower one, every date can be changed, and the generator turns these into your child's real dates.
Which familiar apps land where — WhatsApp, Roblox, YouTube, TikTok
"Sending a photo is the first thing on this phone that can't be taken back" is an argument a twelve-year-old can weigh. "Because I said so" is a position you have to defend again every week. The reasons are in the document, written to be read out loud, and they are why the plan survives the kitchen table.
Checking contacts. Approving every app. Seeing who is in which group chat. The weekly summary. Each of those has an end date too, written down and signed at the same time as everything else.
This is the half almost every parental-control product leaves out, and it is the reason teenagers route around the ones that don't. Supervision that never shrinks teaches a child that compliance is permanent and the only way out is around.
The ladder is about apps. The rules are about the house, and there are fewer of them than most lists suggest — the phone charges outside the bedroom, it is off during class, nobody uses phones at the table, and telling you about a problem never costs your child the phone.
That last one is unconditional and it is in the document in those words, because every other safeguard depends on your child speaking up early.
It isn't a replacement. Keep Family Link or whatever you use — Rungs is the layer above it, answering the question those tools don't: not how do I block this, but what opens, when, and why.
| The category does | Rungs does |
|---|---|
| A lock | A calendar — the ban has a date on it |
| A reporting dashboard | Four moments a year; "nothing happened this month" is a feature |
| Promises unbreakable protection | Doesn't. Tells you when the plan is broken instead |
| Monitoring, indefinitely | A schedule for monitoring to end |
| Screen time as a reward | Readiness, not earning |
On the child's phone, the home screen only shows what has opened so far. Things that haven't arrived yet aren't hidden — they sit in a slot that says what they are and when they come. Camera · at 11 is a very different message from an app that simply refuses to open.
There is also a section of the agreement the child writes: what they want from you, about your phone, about privacy, about how you ask before you look. An agreement only one side wrote is a notice.
This phone becomes yours, one step at a time. That is the promise to the child, and the ladder is what makes it true rather than a thing parents say.
The plan, the ladder, the reasons and the signed printable agreement are free, permanently. That is the part that delivers something in the first sitting, and putting it behind a payment would make "you're not late" a sales line.
The app is what runs the plan afterwards: pairing the child's phone, the home screen that only shows what has opened, around thirty readiness sessions, the milestone notifications with what to say, the tamper alert, and the request flow when your child wants to ask for something early.
| Free | Rungs | |
|---|---|---|
| Build the plan and the ladder | Yes | Yes |
| Printable signed agreement | Yes | Yes |
| The reason behind every step | Yes | Yes |
| The child's home screen | — | Yes |
| Readiness sessions | — | Yes |
| Milestone alerts and what to say | — | Yes |
| Tamper alert and request flow | — | Yes |
$44.99 a year, or $6.99 a month. One price for the whole family — no per-device charge, no per-child charge, and the second parent is included free, whether or not they live in the same house.
Two things worth saying out loud, because the category is bad at both. The price you subscribe at does not increase until your child turns 16. And the 14-day trial sends you our own reminder two days before it ends, rather than relying on you to remember.
The app is still in development. It runs on a real device — setup, pairing, the child's home screen, the curriculum, notifications and tamper detection all work — but it is not on Google Play yet, and there is nothing to install today.
The agreement generator is finished and free to use right now. The child's phone needs to be Android, because the child's home screen can only be built properly there. Parents can use Android or iPhone: the Android version comes first, and the iPhone version, for the parent's side, follows.