Everything off by default. Everything your children need, on.

The Walled Garden is a family internet appliance: a small box beside your router that grows a safe, curated internet for your children, and replaces what it takes away.

Ask for an inviteFirst small batch this fall

The Garden: a garden, not a cage

Inside the wall: warmth, books, play, and prayer. The murk stays outside.

How it works: one box, one vine per child

The Garden Box plugs into the modem you already have and grows one golden vine to each child's place, while the adults keep the ordinary house line. Read why we built it.

The Walled Garden

Why we built this

We locked down the internet for our own children. It worked well enough that other families started asking for it.

The kids need the internet for school. But handing them the internet means handing them all of it. Filter apps send you reports about what already happened. Taking devices away starts a fight every night. And the moment you block something, it turns out their schoolwork needed it. So you cave, and the exceptions pile up until the filter may as well not be there.

All it takes is once. Some things, once seen, cannot be unseen.

So we went at it the other way around: not a better filter, but a smaller, cleaner internet, with a gate and a parent at the gate.

Michael

Lancaster County, Pennsylvania

How it works

  1. Plug the box in beside your router. Your kids get their own Wi-Fi network from its own small access point. Put it where they do their schoolwork; the rest of the house stays exactly as it is.
  2. On their network, the internet is off. Not filtered. Not monitored after the fact. Off. The things they actually need are turned on by name: school sites, their documents, whatever you decide.
  3. When they hit something new, they ask. You approve or deny it right from your phone. Pages that were never approved simply never load.

It replaces what it takes away

The reason this works where filters fail: the box gives back what it walls off.

Your family's own drive and docs
Files and real-time document editing in the browser, for the whole family. Schoolwork lives in your house, not in Google's cloud, and is backed up nightly (encrypted, off the box).
A reference shelf that works with the internet off
Wikipedia, curated for purity, stored right on the box. A library of thousands of classic books. Interactive science simulations. A dictionary and a translator. All of it there even when nothing else is.
The email they already have, kept
Your children's own mailboxes keep working inside the garden. They read and write in Thunderbird on their computers, and only their mail hosts are allowed through the wall.
Calendar and contacts, held at home
The family calendar syncs to every phone from your box, not from an ad company's servers.
A home page made for children
Their browsers open to a page where everything they are allowed is one tap away. And "ask a parent" is right there for everything else.
The kids' home page: everything they're allowed, one tap away.

Who it's for

Homeschool families
The box was built at a homeschool table. The reference shelf, the documents, the ask-and-approve gate: all of it exists because our own school day needed it. If your mornings run on books, notebooks, and one shared computer that keeps drifting toward the open internet, this was built for your house.
Parish and church schools
A small school faces the same battle at scale: real documents and research for every student, without handing every desk the whole internet. One garden can hold a classroom. If you help run a school like that, write to us; the first conversations are shaping what this becomes.

Two honest limits

A determined teenager with a cell plan, or the password to your main Wi-Fi, can get around anything on earth. This makes your home's network safe and visible instead of pretending to be unbeatable.

This is not the whole internet, tamed. Open web search is not part of the box. When schoolwork truly needs the wider web, your child asks, you decide, and the page joins their garden. We would rather draw the wall plainly here than have you find out in week two.

Research, without the open web

Instead of a search engine, your kids can have an AI research helper on their home page: a top-shelf model wrapped in guardrails we configure, tuned for schoolwork, in the habit of showing its sources. Parents can read every chat their own children have with it.

It runs pay-as-you-go, so you only pay for what your kids actually use. Families that don't want AI at all simply leave it off.

What it costs

$799the box, one time

about $39/mothe ongoing service

The monthly service is the living part: maintained lists of approved sites, the ask-and-approve system, and the nightly backup. The research helper is separate and pay-as-you-go. The service is first-batch pricing, and we will be straight with you before you pay a dollar.

And if we ever disappeared, the box keeps working. Your files and your garden stay yours.

Questions parents ask

What stops a determined teenager?

Honestly: nothing stops a determined teenager who has a cell plan or your main Wi-Fi password. We say that out loud on this page because a tool that pretends otherwise teaches families to stop watching. What the garden does is make the family computer a place where the murk cannot simply wander in, and where going around the wall is a decision, not a drift.

Don't modern devices dodge filters by changing their hardware address?

On an ordinary network, yes: a device that randomizes its address can slip past rules that were pinned to the old one. In the garden that trick gets a device nothing, because the network itself only leads to what you have approved. A new address just gets the same closed garden.

Do our kids lose their email?

No. Their existing mailboxes keep working: they read and write in Thunderbird on their computers, and the wall lets only their mail hosts through. The garden is a place their email lives safely, not a thing that takes it away.

What happens if you disappear?

The box does not phone home to stay alive. Your files, your documents, your reference shelf, and the garden itself keep working in your house without us. What stops is the living part: the maintained lists, the support, and the off-site backup. That is the promise we can make with a straight face, and we put it in writing for members.

Will one box cover our whole house?

The kids' access point covers the rooms where school actually happens, and the rest of your house keeps its own Wi-Fi untouched. Most homes need nothing more. If yours is the exception, we will tell you during setup, which we do personally for every first-batch family.

Can you see what our children do?

We cannot. The box lives in your house and answers to you. When a child asks for something new, the request goes to your phone, not to our office. The only chats a parent can read are their own children's with the research helper, and that is a switch you own.

The path to a box of your own

  1. Ask for an invite
  2. We call and talk it through
  3. Your box is built with the first batch
  4. We ship it and set it up with you
  5. Your family is a member

How joining worksWhat members getHow support works

Ask for an invite

The first small batch goes out this fall, and we set each one up personally. No payment now, no commitment. We will write to you when a box can be yours, and an honest "not for us" helps as much as a yes.