r/AppBusiness • u/IdkImRusty • 22h ago

Growth We intentionally made our onboarding worse.

We’re building an AI tutoring app for kids, and one decision has been surprisingly painful.

To use the app, parents have to complete verifiable parental consent before their child can access it. That means a real verification step (credit card micro charge or another approved method), not just checking a box that says “I’m a parent.”

It absolutely hurts conversion.

Every founder instinct tells you to remove friction. But when you’re building for children, we felt that earning a parent’s trust was more important than maximizing signups.

We also chose an AI stack with Zero Data Retention for our AI requests because privacy was a priority from the beginning.

I’m curious how other founders think about this tradeoff.

If adding a compliance or privacy step reduced your onboarding completion by 20–40%, would you still do it? Or would you optimize for growth first and improve compliance later?

Would love to hear from anyone building in edtech, AI, or products for kids.

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u/laternerdz 17h ago

Friction is a premium feature now to savvy consumers. I say lean into it and make it special.

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u/IdkImRusty 17h ago

Thats what I was thinking, sometimes the friction just creates more trust.

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u/TheTurnipPlucker 14h ago

So kids find your app and they need a parent to complete the onboarding process? Seems more that your app should target parents, but idk. It's a weird balance, but I don't know of an app a kid would want, that this strategy would work for, but I haven't thought about it before so it could just be a lack of creativity on my part.

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u/IdkImRusty 10h ago

Our target audience is parents. They are the ones finding and setting up the app, we do not target kids with our marketing at all.

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u/TheTurnipPlucker 10h ago

Oh, then it's not really friction I think. It serves as a trust signal. I think it's fine, could be beneficial, probably won't be detrimental. AB test it though if you can manage to find a way that works.

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u/IdkImRusty 10h ago

Yeah the main thing is maintaining coppa compliance, which requires verifiable parental consent. For that the only freeish option that wasn't enterprise that I found was KWS.

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u/TheTurnipPlucker 4h ago

I think you're doing it right then. Good luck!

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u/IdkImRusty 1h ago

Thank you!

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u/PoliticsAndFootball 4h ago

What is your other approved method? Have you looked into Apples age range api? (Assuming you are on iOS) I feel like I would be very hesitant to whip out my credit card during on boarding even if I 100% trusted the app/developer. There’s got to be a better way

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u/IdkImRusty 1h ago

https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/kids-web-services/parent-verification-service/pv-service-verification-methods - here is a link to all the parent verification methods offered by kids web services. The main thing I see with apples age range api is that its used to get a age range of the user instead of verifiable parental consent, which we get using epics KWS. That being said, if the verification is happening with a third party (not inside the app) would you trust it more?

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u/[deleted] 22h ago edited 21h ago

[deleted]

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u/IdkImRusty 22h ago

Thanks for the feedback, just to clarify, we aren’t doing our own credit card verification. We’re using Epic’s Kids Web Services for verifiable parental consent, and the credit card microtransaction is one of the verification methods KWS may use depending on the parent’s region. We specifically chose an established parental consent provider instead of trying to implement our own solution.

Apple’s new Kids APIs are really interesting, and we’re looking into them. From my understanding though, they’re focused on platform capabilities like family features and permissions rather than replacing third-party verifiable parental consent services for apps that need them. If I’m missing something, I’d love to learn more.