About Hoobaloo
A kids’ OS that takes safety seriously and creativity even more seriously.
Hoobaloo is a Progressive Web App that turns a tablet, Chromebook, or old laptop into a curated, kiosk-locked environment for children ages 2 through 18 — with parent controls, flexible learning Adventures, activity visibility, private memories, and family messaging built in.
Our mission
We believe screen time can be the same shape as a Saturday afternoon at the kitchen table: drawing, building, reading, asking weird questions, making music, getting bored, making more. What we want from technology for kids is what we want from a good library or a good rec room — permission to wander, scaffolding when they need it, an adult in the loop when it matters, and absolutely nobody trying to extract attention from them in exchange for ads or engagement metrics.
Hoobaloo is the small, deliberate version of that. One screen, thirteen apps, five tiers, a learning journey that includes life away from the device, and a family in control of what becomes evidence or a memory. We say “no” to a lot of features that would make the product louder but childhood smaller.
What we believe
Six values that shape every engineering decision. The full charter lives in the project’s engineering guide; these are the ones a parent considering Hoobaloo should know.
Safety is not a feature
Every layer of Hoobaloo — auth, storage, AI prompts, output filtering, audit logging — is designed assuming the worst case. Charter-grade non-negotiables are codified in the engineering guide and gate every merge.
Kids are the user, not the product
A child profile starts with a display name, age, avatar, and family-chosen interests. There is no child email, phone number, targeted advertising, or data sale. Optional photos and voice notes require explicit parent consent and retention controls.
An OS that grows up
Hoobaloo isn't a toddler app you outgrow at 5. The five tiers (ages 2 through 18) escalate visual vocabulary, complexity, and the same apps' depth — Doodle becomes a vector editor, Block Studio becomes Pyodide, Storybook becomes chapter epics.
AI as a co-creator, never a replacement
AI suggests, the kid creates. The Creative Writing app hands back a sentence to consider; it never writes the paragraph. Storybook generates the picture book, the kid picks the path. Ownership of every piece stays with the human who made it.
Evidence, never a label
A saved project, completed activity, or parent observation can become learning evidence. Screen minutes, stray taps, weak attempts, and unconfirmed AI suggestions cannot. Every learning stage links back to what actually happened.
Real life belongs in the record
A physical book, a loaf of bread, a garden question, a long walk, a family routine, and a museum trip count beside app activity. Hoobaloo is designed to send curiosity back into the world, not trap it on a screen.
Compliance posture
The legal floor for a child-directed product is high. We aim to clear it with daylight.
Verifiable parental consent
Before a child profile can be created, the parent authorizes a 50¢ charge on a real credit card and we refund it immediately — the FTC-accepted method of proving the consenting adult controls a financial instrument. The full consent record (method, IP, timestamp, evidence hash) lives in our audit log and is included in every account export.
Export and delete on demand
Account → Export downloads every row tied to your family as JSON, including learning evidence, plans, timeline memories, saved work, messages, audit history, moderation decisions, and consent records. Individual memories and optional media can be removed on their own. Account deletion covers the full family record and its retention lifecycle.
No PII in logs or external services
Parent and child IDs are hashed with HMAC-SHA256 before they cross into error reports, or any third-party surface. Email, names, message bodies, voice transcripts, and AI prompt content never leave our database in plaintext form.
Pre- and post-filtering on every model call
Every kid-typed prompt and every AI-generated output runs through input and output moderation. Planning, activity tagging, and parent insights use separate schema-validated services. AI cannot silently update a child’s learning record; a parent reviews suggestions and can correct or dismiss every inference.
Hoobaloo is built and operated outside the EU and is not currently certified under specific schoolboard programs (FERPA, state student-data privacy acts). If your district requires that, get in touch — we’ll tell you honestly whether we’re a fit yet.
Who’s building this
A small operation, on purpose. The goal is to be the kind of company a parent can trust precisely because it’s small enough to be answerable.
Built by a parent
Hoobaloo was started in 2025 by a parent who wanted screen time that felt creative, safe, and age-appropriate for one specific four-year-old. The first tester is the founder's daughter — every kid-side surface is shaped by the question "would she actually want to use this?"
Small, deliberate engineering
A single Quart backend, a single Postgres database, a single Redis, a single R2 bucket — no microservices, no Kubernetes, no half-cooked observability stack. Discord webhooks plus structured logs cover the "did it break / what's happening?" loop until the team grows past three people.
Open about what we do and don't do
Our security charter, evidence rules, and the products we explicitly chose not to build—open chat, kid-to-stranger matching, hidden monitoring, competitive rankings—shape the product in code. Trust is a function of what you can inspect, correct, export, and delete.
Questions? Concerns? A use case we haven’t thought of?
We answer every email a parent sends us, usually within a day. Reach out at [email protected].