Nightlight runs on your Mac and reads your child’s messages there — and only there. Each evening you get a warm, plain-language brief on how their day actually went. If something serious ever appears, you’re alerted right away.
Private alpha, macOS on Apple Silicon. We’ll email you an invite — nothing else.
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 short, warm read on the day — tone, topics, the conversations that mattered, and the small bright spots you’d otherwise miss.
Signs of grooming, self-harm, threats, or bullying page you immediately. Everything below that 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 — it nudges, it doesn’t snoop.
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 a current version of macOS. The AI runs locally, so no extra hardware and no per-message fees.
The alpha covers iMessage. More sources are planned and will roll out one at a time, each held to the same rule: read locally, summarize locally, upload nothing.
The alpha is free for invited families. Pricing for launch will be a simple household subscription — no per-message metering, no tiers of your child’s safety.
A daily brief on your child’s world, written on your Mac. Alerts only when something needs you. Nothing leaves the machine.
Join the alpha