FAQ

KidSift reads school, activity, and family mail in the inbox you connect and turns it into a daily plan: what to do, what to pack, and what’s coming. It is not a chat inbox. You glance Home, confirm dates, and get lock-screen reminders.

Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and iCloud. Connect them in Setup with the matching Sign in button (or an iCloud app-specific password). KidSift is built for those four — you do not need to forward everything to a new address.

Yes. KidSift opens your mailbox read-only and only ever reads it — never replying, moving, deleting, or even marking mail as read, so your unread count stays your own. Your daily summary and reminders arrive from KidSift (hello@kidsift.ai), not from your own account, so they land in your inbox like any other mail. It looks for school and activity mail for the children you add. You’re in control: disconnect in Setup, or skip any calendar draft. We do not send your mail to other families. The details are in our Privacy Policy and Terms of Service.

With your email and your KidSift password. Signing up sends a link to your email; opening it creates the account, and a welcome email follows with a one-time login token. The first time, open Sign in, enter your email and that token, and KidSift asks you to Choose a password. From then on you sign in with your email and that password, and the token stops working. A parent you invite does the same with the token in their invite.

Choosing or changing a password signs out your other devices, including a kitchen wall screen. Sign in on each one again with your email and the new password.

Forgot your password, or never got the welcome email? Type your address on the sign-in page and tap Email me a login token, then sign in with the token in that email and choose a password.

On a phone, add KidSift to your Home Screen after the first sign-in so lock-screen alerts can work. If KidSift asks you to sign in again when you were already signed in, that is expected after a security update — your email and password still work.

Setup step 2, or Settings → Add student. Name, school, and homeroom teacher help KidSift match the right mail. After Scan Inbox, KidSift may suggest a school from sender domains — tap Use this to confirm (nothing is saved until you do). Standard is up to 2 children; Pro is up to 6.

The daily scan looks at new mail (about the last day, a bit more on Mondays). It is not a full-year search every morning. If a date is still ahead, add it from a flyer on Home, or confirm it under Add these dates when KidSift drafts it. Uploading a school `.ics` on Calendar also fills the month.

On Home tap Add from flyer. Photo, PDF, paste, or a few words. KidSift reads text from photos and PDFs when AI is connected; dates stay as drafts until you confirm. If your family has a forward-to address set up, Settings → Capture flyers shows it.

Safari only delivers KidSift alerts after the icon is on your Home Screen: Share → Add to Home Screen, open that icon, then allow notifications. The in-app card walks through this. Night-before reminders also go by email; SMS is on Pro.

Install KidSift from the browser menu (Add to Home screen / Install app), open it, and allow notifications. If Chrome blocked them, tap the lock icon next to the address, then Permissions → Notifications → Allow.

The night before each event, at your night-before reminder time (Settings → Preferences). That is one text per reminder. For a second text on the day itself, turn on Also text the morning of on the Reminders page; the line under it says what time that text goes. Turned on once that morning's texts have gone, it starts the next morning; the line under it says so. If your family's texts come only on the morning of, the switch reads Text the morning of, and turning it off stops your family's texts. Texts need Pro, and only a full parent can change the switch. Turning it off never takes back a text already sent.

Both include a 14-day trial, smart summaries, calendar drafts, and email reminders. Standard is $9.99/mo for up to 2 children. Pro is $14.99/mo for up to 6 children and 100 SMS reminders/month.

Settings shows how many trial days are left. Tap Start subscription any time to add a card — you are not charged until the trial is up, and the days you have left are kept. If the trial ends without a card, your daily plan pauses and nothing new is added; everything already in KidSift stays. Start a subscription to pick it back up. Once you have a card on file, Manage billing is where you switch plans, update the card, or cancel.

Yes. Settings → Parents. Send an invite. They sign in with their own email and the one-time login token in the invite, then choose their own KidSift password. A limited parent can use the plan but cannot change billing or remove people.

The reminder is not a second event. An activity sits on your calendar on the day it happens, and a reminder with the same name as a date you added shares that date's row. Tap the row to see which night KidSift will remind you, and preview or skip the reminder on Reminders. The kitchen wall's Tomorrow column is only things that are actually tomorrow.

Mail providers expire the permission they give apps — after a password change, a security review, or just time. When that happens KidSift can't open your mail, so there's no plan to build. You get one email about it and a red banner on Home; tap Reconnect and sign in again, and the next morning's plan goes out as usual. Nothing is lost while you're disconnected — the school mail is still in your inbox waiting.

KidSift saw both the old email and the new one, so the row tells you: "moved from Wed, Sep 23" sits next to the new date on Home, on Schoolwork, and on the calendar. It stays for two weeks, then the new date is simply the date.

Settings → Time zone and daily summary. Pick your time zone and the hour your morning summary should arrive. Everything runs on that clock: the summary, night-before reminders, and what counts as due tomorrow. Setup also offers your device's time zone if it differs.

Open Schoolwork, pick the child if you need to, expand the item, tap Mark done — or Dismiss if it was never yours. Forms, bring, and wear lists live there too.

You can also tap Done straight from the This Week list on Home, without opening Schoolwork at all.

Yes. On Schoolwork, tap Assigned to me next to Open, Done and Dismissed. It narrows the list to the items handed to you, across Open, Done and Dismissed, and the page’s address remembers it, so you can bookmark it. The chip only appears once you have invited a second parent, because there is nobody to hand an item to before then.

Home will say so: "4 school emails didn't match Dean", with a couple of the subject lines.

KidSift only keeps mail that is about your child, so it knows whose morning it belongs to. It decides that from their name, their grade, their teacher, and the activities you set up. When a school year turns over and a child moves up a grade or changes teacher, a general school email stops matching until you update them.

Open Settings, check the child's grade, school and homeroom teacher, and the next run picks those emails up.

Files holds them. Anything that needs you leads, then the rest by the week it arrived, with a chip per child. KidSift keeps a file when something in the email needs you — a form to sign, a permission slip — or when it came from a school or activity you already set up. A logo in a signature is not a document, so those are dropped.

If the email only links to a file rather than attaching it, KidSift follows the link and keeps the file anyway — PDFs, Word and Excel files, images and calendar files, including things shared from Google Drive or Docs. For the schools and clubs you set up it follows any link. For anyone else — a teacher posting through ParentSquare or a similar class app — it opens only a Google Drive or Docs file, and only when that email put something on your child's Schoolwork; the file then sits on that row, and Files marks it as not from a sender you set up. If the share is private, KidSift can't open it: nothing is kept, and the row still shows the link.

Plenty of schools send the newsletter as a web page rather than a file. KidSift keeps the page itself, named after the page's own title — or the subject of the email, when the page gives no useful one — so it sits on Files like any other document and opens with one tap. Anything on it that could run is stripped out before it is saved, along with its styling, so what you open is a plain, readable copy rather than a live page. If the page is really just a wrapper around a PDF, you get the PDF instead.

When a file belongs to something on Schoolwork, it also appears on that item, so you can open the form from the row that asks for it.

Files stay for the school year. After the year turns over, the old ones are cleared out.

KidSift drafts calendar events from mail and flyers. They are not on your family calendar until you tap Add. Skip if it isn’t yours. Undo is there for a few seconds either way. You’ll see this strip on Home and Calendar.

Drafts are grouped by the day they fall on. School often mentions one outing in several emails — the trip, the permission slip, what to wear, what to pack — so a day can hold more than one draft. Add all takes the whole day in one tap and saves it as one calendar entry; Undo on that day takes all of it back together. If there are more days than fit, the strip says how many and opens them in one tap — nothing is hidden.

A glance board for the whole family — packing lists and what’s coming — meant for a tablet on the counter. Open it from Home or Kitchen wall. For a sitter, use Settings → Caregiver share (a link that expires).

It shows tomorrow only: what to pack, what’s due, and what’s on. On a quiet day each card says so in one line.

Two things on the same day that collide: they overlap, or for two kids they start within 45 minutes of each other. It appears on Home and the kitchen wall only when there is one, for today or tomorrow, so you can see the squeeze before you are in it.

Sign out is in the menu. To disconnect an inbox, return to Setup and connect a different account, or contact hello@kidsift.ai if you need the mailbox removed.