A small library of channels we’ve actually watched. Matched to who your kid is — their age, what they’re into, what you want them to be watching.
No autoplay. No “Up Next.” No rabbit holes.
~1 minute to set up. No commitment.
Free while we’re small.
Built differently
YouTube Kids gets weirder the more your kid watches — its recommender rewards whatever holds attention longest. Wonderstream’s doesn’t. We match your kid to a set of trusted channels once at signup, then keep that library fresh with new uploads from those same channels. The selection doesn’t chase their attention.
No autoplay rabbit hole. No “Up Next.” Just videos from channels you’d actually pick.
How it works
A 30-second form, or just describe them in your own words — “she’s 7, into ocean animals, hates jump scares.” We hear you either way.
We match them to channels from our curated catalog of vetted creators, then pull videos that fit — across subjects: science, nature, art, music, reading.
Kids browse + react + favorite. Parents see everything in the dashboard. Library refreshes nightly with new uploads, retires stuff they ignore.
What you get
Every channel in the catalog was watched and approved by a real person (the maker, hi 👋) against Common Sense and AAP criteria. Not “the algorithm thinks this is safe.” Actually safe, because someone read it. The matching to your kid is automated — what gets matched is not.
Other apps stop at age band. We use their interests, reading level, content intensity, and quirks (“gets nightmares” → no jump scares) to build a library that fits.
Every night we check the channels they love for new uploads and retire videos they’ve ignored for two weeks. They never run out — and they never see the same 12 videos forever.
Real dashboard with what they watched, what they returned to, what they reacted to, what they hid. No surprises. Weekly digest email lands in your inbox.
Each kid in your family has their own profile and their own pool. The 9yo gets griffpatch and Mark Rober; the 5yo gets Cosmic Kids Yoga and SciShow Kids. Switch in two taps.
No data sale. No ad networks. No third-party tracking. Watch history is yours — we use it to tune your kid’s library and that’s it. Add channels we don’t have, hide what doesn’t click.
Wonderstream is built by one parent (hi 👋) for two specific kids — and now opening to a few more families. Free while we’re small. About a minute to set up, then it’s just an app. Feedback welcome — not required.
Get early access →Quick form. We’ll get back within a day or two.
Questions
YouTube Kids is free but its recommender keeps rewarding overstimulation — the more your kid watches, the weirder the suggestions get, and parents keep finding things that slipped through. Wonderstream works differently. The catalog of channels is hand-vetted by a human. The matching to your kid happens once at signup, then the library just refreshes with new uploads from those same channels. No autoplay into something weird. No bottomless scroll of suggested videos. Nothing chasing their attention.
Most of them either give you a generic library segmented by age band, or hand you a build-it-yourself playlist tool. Neither really asks who your specific kid is. Wonderstream does. You describe them once (or in your own words), we set up a library that fits — and you can still edit, hide, add as you go.
We embed YouTube’s privacy-enhanced player (youtube-nocookie), which strips tracking cookies. But ads on the video itself are set by the creator’s YouTube monetization — those will still appear, same as anywhere else on YouTube. If you have YouTube Premium signed in on the device, you generally won’t see them. The big things we remove are the things that come AROUND videos: the algorithmic recommendations, autoplay into the next thing, comments, related videos at the end. Those are gone.
I do, for now. The catalog has 100+ channels vetted against Common Sense Media + AAP criteria — Wild Kratts, SciShow Kids, BBC Earth Kids, Tate Kids, Cosmic Kids Yoga, Hoffman Academy, griffpatch, and many more. You can also add your own channels via the parent dashboard. As the pilot grows we’ll let you suggest channels for the catalog too.
Designed for 4–12. Profile setup adjusts content intensity and reading level so the library scales with them year to year.
Free during the pilot. We haven’t settled on a longer-term pricing model yet — once we’ve heard from a few families about what feels right, we’ll figure it out together. Pilot families will get told first and given a fair landing spot, not switched to a paid tier without warning.
Your family data lives in your account. No cross-family sharing, no ad networks, no third-party trackers, no data sale. Watch history is yours — we use it only to tune your kid’s library. Sign-in is by magic link (no passwords stored). We’ll publish a real privacy policy as the pilot scales; happy to share the draft if you ask.
I’m one parent who got tired of YouTube Kids feeding my two daughters increasingly weird stuff, and tired of paid alternatives being either app-store-game-shovelware, locked-down babyish libraries, or boring. So I built what I wished existed. The pilot is to make sure it works for kids other than mine before deciding whether this becomes a small sustainable thing or a bigger one.