A small product with a narrow purpose
Tales By You makes personalised picture books for the children of one household, and tries very hard not to become anything else.
The story a child wants is the one they are in
Children ask to hear the same book two hundred times, and the ones that survive that treatment are usually the ones where they recognise something of themselves. Most children never get a book with their own name, their own dog, and their own front door in it, because commissioning one used to be a luxury.
That part is now cheap. What is not cheap is doing it responsibly: keeping it private, screening it before anyone reads it, refusing the requests that need a human instead of a story, and never turning a bedtime routine into a growth funnel. That is where nearly all of our effort goes.
Subscriptions. That is the whole model. Families pay a monthly price for a set number of books, and that pays for the writing, the illustration, the storage, and the people.
We do not run advertising, we do not sell or broker family data, and we do not train models on your children's stories to sell something else. If we ever needed to change how we earn money, that would be a conversation with you, not a quiet edit to a policy page.
See the plansFive rules we hold ourselves to
These are constraints on the product, not slogans. Several of them cost us revenue, which is roughly how you can tell they are real.
The child is not the customer
Children cannot consent to a purchase and should not be persuaded to want one. Nothing inside the reading experience sells, upsells, notifies, or links out. The adult decides, in the adult part of the app.
Private unless you decide otherwise
There is no feed to grow, so there is no reason to nudge anyone into sharing. A story lives in one household. Sharing is a deliberate act with an expiring link you can revoke.
Honest ceilings, honest prices
Every plan has a real number of books, because every book costs real money to make. We will not print the word unlimited and then quietly throttle you.
No engagement targets
We are not trying to increase your screen time or your child's. A family that makes four thoughtful books a month is a better outcome than one that makes forty.
Say what is not built
Where a feature is unfinished, the product says so. You will find several places on this site where we tell you a button does not exist yet rather than taking the sale.
Early, and saying so
Tales By You is pre-launch. Legal review, a security review, and a child development review are all still open, and we treat them as things that must finish before we open the doors properly.