Protecting the machine

Parental controls

Content categories, bedtime curfew, daily time budget, per-app blocks — and the honesty rules that go with them.

5 min read · updated July 25, 2026

Parental controls are four independent tools. You can use one and ignore the rest. They're enforced by the same blocking engine as everything else, so what a blocked app experiences is exactly what Blocking describes.

Content categories

Sites are classified into categories, and you choose which ones to block. Classification is list-based, so the honest description is this: it catches the overwhelming majority, and it will both miss things and occasionally block something harmless. Treat it as a strong filter, not a guarantee — no category filter anywhere is a guarantee.

Bedtime curfew

A window during which the internet is off on this machine. It ends at a wall-clock time, so a device left running overnight comes back automatically. Traffic that's already open when the curfew starts is cut — a game session will drop rather than finish.

Daily time budget

A number of minutes of internet access per day, counted while traffic is actually flowing. It resets at midnight local time. Time spent with the machine on but idle doesn't count against it.

Per-app blocks

The same one-click block as the rest of the product, so you can cut off a specific game or client without touching browsing.

The settings password

All of it is meaningless if the person it applies to can switch it off, so a password gates Settings, pausing monitoring, quitting the app, and changing protection mode.

There is no recovery for this password. It is not stored anywhere we can reach, and we cannot reset it for you. Write it down somewhere that is not the machine it protects.

Be honest about it

Our acceptable use policy requires that the person using a monitored device knows the controls exist. That's not only a legal position. A child who discovers hidden monitoring learns that they're watched rather than that the internet has limits, and the practical outcome is a workaround rather than a conversation.

Parental controls also stop at the edge of this machine. A phone on mobile data, a different laptop, or a friend's house are all outside what any PC-resident tool can see.

Still stuck? Open a support ticket — we reply within one business day.