What Porchlight can and can’t see — and why your child should know it’s there.
Nothing matches that. Email us and a human answers.
No. 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. Porchlight 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 Porchlight for openness and recommend it. Setup includes a family agreement written for kids, and research (and common sense) says monitoring works better as a shared understanding than a secret. Read the page we wrote for your child →
Yes. If the Mac is your child’s rather than a shared family machine, an optional quiet mode keeps Porchlight off the screen: no icon in the menu bar, no icon in the Dock, no pop-up notifications on that Mac, and the app asks for the parent PIN whenever it’s opened. Your briefs and any alerts still arrive by email exactly as before — nothing about what Porchlight reads or sends changes.
Turn it on during setup (the switch sits under the parent PIN fields), or later in Settings → Privacy → Keep Porchlight out of sight on this Mac. Because it’s the switch a curious kid would reach for first, flipping it in either direction asks for the parent PIN. It’s off unless you choose it.
To open Porchlight while it’s out of sight, launch it from the Applications folder or Spotlight and enter the PIN — the home screen appears for that window; the next time it opens it asks again. To turn quiet mode off, open it that way, then Settings → Privacy and flip the switch (PIN again).
One thing we’d ask you to keep in mind: Porchlight is built for openness, and quiet mode is discreet, not covert. The app stays listed in Applications, and the page we wrote for your child says plainly that it may run without a visible icon. Read that page with them: what your parent sees →
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 or requested from us, or appear in a breach. We never have it.
No. Your child's messages are read on your Mac and never reach our systems, so there is nothing for support to open. If you send us your logs from the app, they contain status, counts and timings only, never message text (the same files you can read yourself any time in the app's log folder). The one place your child's words exist outside the Mac is the brief in your own inbox, which travels through our email provider the way any email does; support does not receive a copy.
Alpha support is answered by the people building Porchlight, usually within a day. Safety-alert delivery problems jump the queue.
One click in the app sends the status logs to support: counts and timings, never anything your child wrote. Open Porchlight → Send logs
On a Mac without Porchlight, or writing from your phone? Email us your macOS version, what you expected, and what happened instead. That's plenty to start.