One platform · every device · every kid · every minute
Verify every rule in 100 milliseconds —
before your kid finds out it doesn't work.
You hit stop. The video keeps playing. You set bedtime. Snapchat pings at midnight. You bought parental controls — but you can't tell if they're actually working.
GuardianGate is built for the parent who's been burned by every other tool. Network discovery, schedule enforcement, and a real kill switch in one platform. Every rule you set, you can prove works before saving it. Click Test. 87 scenarios. 100 milliseconds. Stop guessing.
$1 for your first month, then $17.99/month. Works on the router you already own. The last parental control you'll ever buy.
Why one instead of four
Most families end up running three or four tools that don't talk to each other. Each one solves a slice. None solves the whole. Here's what the patchwork looks like — and what we replaced it with.
|
Built-in
Apple Screen Time · Google Family Link · Router app
|
App-based
Bark · Qustodio · Net Nanny
|
Hardware box
Circle Plus · Gryphon · Firewalla
|
GuardianGate
Replaces all three
|
|
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Works on iOS, Android, Mac, and Windows | One ecosystem only | Yes — with an app on the kid's phone | Yes — at the network | Yes — all four, no app needed |
| You can verify your own rules before saving | No | No | No | Yes — 87 scenarios verified in 100ms |
| Nothing installed on the kid's phone | Mixed | Required — kids learn to uninstall it | Yes | Yes |
| Travel-aware (bedtime in their actual timezone) | Partial | No | No | Yes — local time, anywhere on earth |
| Kills the stream that's already playing | No | No | No | Yes — schedule + on-device agent together |
| Total Shutdown (one button, every device) | No | No | No | Yes — for dinner, bedtime, grounded |
| Printable family agreement | No | No | No | Yes — sign it, stick it on the fridge |
| Hardware required | None | None | $250–$800 box | None — your router already works |
| Monthly cost | Free, plus your router fee | $10–$15 / month | $5–$10 / month on top of the box | $17.99 / month — flat, all included |
The moment you stop guessing
Every other parental control product asks you to trust the dashboard. We give you a button that proves the dashboard told you the truth.
Open your kid's profile. Look at the apps you've allowed, the schedules you've set, the daily caps. Then click Test profile rules.
In about a tenth of a second, a panel appears: "All rules behaving as expected. 57 allows confirmed. 30 blocks confirmed." Eighty-seven scenarios just got tested — for every device on your network, for every hour of the day, against every rule you set.
That's the moment most parents stop guessing. We built that button on purpose. No other parental control company offers it. That should tell you something about who's actually confident their rules work.
Numbers shown are typical for a family-of-four profile. Yours will reflect your actual rule set.
A gap you've probably noticed
You hit the stop button. You set bedtime. You turned on the schedule. The video keeps playing. Most parents notice this and assume they did something wrong — they didn't. It's how the tools are built. Most parental controls block new traffic. They don't stop traffic that's already running.
GuardianGate is built differently. When the schedule says stop, the screen stops. Not in a minute. Not in fifteen. Now.
Three layers, one verdict
Most products only do one thing — block at the router, or install an app on the phone. Kids find the gaps. We close them all, in plain English: the Wi-Fi sees the device, the schedule decides what's allowed, and a small helper on the device makes it stick.
1. The Wi-Fi sees them
Our scanner spots every device on your home Wi-Fi within seconds. eero, Netgear, TP-Link, Linksys, Asus, Google Wifi — whatever router you already own. Every device gets a name, a profile, and a verdict. New device just connected? You'll see it before they finish unboxing.
Discovery · adapts to your router · no new hardware
2. The schedule decides
Block by app, by category, or by your own list. Different rules for school mornings, weekends, homework hour, bedtime. Every device knows which kid it belongs to, which profile applies, and what the schedule says right this minute. The kid switches networks? Rules follow.
Enforcement · per-app · per-day · per-hour
3. The kill switch
When the schedule says bedtime, a small helper on the phone, tablet, or computer kills any stream that's already running. That's the piece every other product skips. Stop means stop. Total Shutdown takes every kid device dark at once — one tap from your dashboard, for dinner or grounded.
Agent · iOS · Android · macOS · Windows
What a real schedule looks like
Most parental controls give you one big bucket called screen time. That's not how real families work. Here's what a Tuesday actually looks like for a family using GuardianGate.
| App | When it's allowed | Daily cap | Right now |
|---|---|---|---|
| Snapchat | Mon–Thu, 3:30–5:30 PM | 30 min | Open · 22 min left |
| YouTube | Weekdays until 9 PM, weekends until 10 | 30 weekday / 180 weekend | Open · 14 min left |
| Duolingo | Any time, any day | No cap | Always open |
| School Classroom | School hours + homework window | No cap | Always open |
| Roblox | Not allowed on this profile | — | Blocked |
| TikTok | Not allowed on this profile | — | Blocked |
Their phone still works
Most parental controls that work at the network layer accidentally break the kid's phone. Notifications stop. The phone can't update itself. iCloud breaks. The kid thinks the phone is broken — and blames the parents.
We figured this out the hard way and fixed it. System essentials always flow. Apple Push, iCloud, the captive-portal check, OS updates, certificate checks — all work normally. We curated specific patterns that bypass even our most aggressive blocklists, surgically, without opening doors that shouldn't be open.
The result: your kid's phone behaves like a phone. Notifications still arrive. The phone updates itself overnight. Cellular services work. The only thing it can't do is reach TikTok at 11 PM.
Their phone works. The bedtime works. Both can be true.
Reach beyond your living room
Bedtime at grandma's house on the other coast is still 9 PM at grandma's house. A school-night schedule on vacation in Rome stays a school-night schedule — on Rome's clock, not yours. When the device crosses a timezone, the schedule crosses with it.
And when you need to ground a kid mid-trip, the shutdown reaches them. You tap stop from your kitchen — the screen in Madrid goes dark in seconds. No "they're not on your home Wi-Fi" excuses. The gate is wherever the device is.
A fridge contract, not surveillance
GuardianGate generates a one-page document showing exactly what's allowed, what's blocked, when, and why. Parent reads it. Kid reads it. Both sign it. It goes on the fridge.
Most parental controls hide the rules in a dashboard the parent barely visits and the kid never sees. That turns parental controls into something that feels like spying. We made the opposite choice — externalize the rules on purpose.
The agreement reframes everything. "Why is Snapchat blocked during homework?" isn't an argument anymore. It's a line on the printout the kid already signed. Rules in writing — not arguments at the dinner table.
This isn't spy software. It's a family conversation backed by a tool that enforces what you both agreed to.
For: Maya · 14 · Sikka Household
Snapchat: Mon–Thu, 3:30 to 5:30 PM only. 30 minute daily cap.
YouTube: Weekdays until 9 PM. 30 minute weekday cap, 180 weekend.
School apps: Always available.
Phones away: Dinner (6:30–7:30 PM) and after 9 PM.
If a rule needs to change: We talk first. Together.
Defense in depth
Phishing sites, ad trackers, malware, crypto-mining, scam pages. We pull from the same blocklists corporate security teams use, then layer your family rules on top.
550,000+ domains
The community standard
Curated, updated daily
Professional-grade filtering
Multi-source aggregate
Used by security teams worldwide
Your "allow YouTube" decision overrides the blocklist for YouTube's real domains. But an unknown phishing site still gets blocked even if you never thought to consider it. You don't have to be a security expert. The defaults catch what you'd want to catch anyway.
Defense in depth — without asking you to learn what defense in depth means.
Hardened against stolen passwords and curious teenagers
Most products give one password the keys to the kingdom. We made the explicit choice not to.
Your email and password get you into the dashboard.
Changing rules, schedules, or device assignments needs a separate four-digit PIN. Stored apart from your login.
Destructive actions — disabling enforcement, removing a child profile — need a final confirm. Slows down any teenager who got past the first two.
Parental controls protect kids. They should be hardened against theft, social engineering, and the smart kid who watched you type your PIN once.
The console
Devices, profiles, schedules, and live status — without ten tabs and a phone. The same surface used to run real households today.
What else you get
Seven-day grid. School mornings differ from Saturday afternoons. Per profile, per app, by the hour.
One button. Every kid device on the network goes dark until you lift it. For dinner, for bedtime, for grounded.
Every device is tagged as secured or pending. Mystery boxes don't stay mysterious. You decide what they are — or they don't get out.
Helpers run on iOS, Android, macOS, and Windows. The verdict is the same wherever the screen is.
Our infrastructure has no third-party tracking. Your kids' browsing history isn't an ad product, and never will be.
Every block records exactly why: schedule-time, quota-exceeded, app-not-allowed. When your kid asks, you don't guess.
Why we can ship this
Coordinating three layers — the Wi-Fi, the schedule, the kill switch — across every operating system, every router, every timezone, without breaking the kid's phone, is genuinely hard. There's a reason no one else has shipped it as one product.
The Sikka name has been part of connectivity infrastructure for over thirty years — as a regional internet service provider, then in broadcast as Sikka TV, both in India. My own thirty-three years in the U.S. — over twenty as a CFO and COO — were spent running enterprise technology across wholesale, distribution, and pharmaceutical operations.
GuardianGate is built and registered in the United States. It's the family's first consumer product. We bring the same discipline that keeps an ISP running — uptime, predictability, respect for the network as a system that has to just work — to your family's network.
The expertise that watches a network is the expertise that protects one.
A note from the founders
I'm not a tech founder. I'm a father — and GuardianGate has two founders, my daughter and me.
I spent over twenty years as a CFO and COO — over twenty years in rooms where decisions about other people's well-being were made on a quarterly cadence. Outside those rooms I'd come to a conviction that had nothing to do with profit: a society is measured not by what it builds, but by how well it protects its most vulnerable members.
That conviction stayed abstract until the evening my daughter asked me, "Dad, why can't we just control what comes into our house?"
She was twelve when she asked it. She's fourteen now. She sees the problem in her own school, her own friend group, her own phone. I see it in the data, the research, and the court documents. Between us we have everything we need to build something that actually works — and she's been with it the whole way: helping design the profiles, naming the rules, telling me when the dashboard would confuse a kid, telling me when it would confuse a parent.
I built GuardianGate because I was tired of running four products that didn't talk to each other and still left my kid exposed. I wanted one tool that did the whole job — and I wanted my daughter to help build it, so the rules would feel like a conversation in our house, not a cage around hers.
Big Tech won't save your children. Governments are years behind the technology. Schools can't follow children home. The only firewall that matters is the one in your house. GuardianGate is what we built — for our family, and for yours.
— V., founder · with my daughter, co-founder & co-designer
Affordable. Verifiable. Robust.
Your first month is $1
Start protecting your family today. $1 for your first month, then $17.99/month. Cancel in one click, any time.
$1 first month · then $17.99/month · less than Disney+ · cancel any time