The family behind Growing Stories

Growing Stories is made by one family, in the evenings, once the dishes are done. It began as a way to get one boy to sit still long enough for a story.

Dad. Picks the stories and writes the pages.

Mum. Reads every page before a child does.

Our son. The first reader, and the strictest.

How it started

One of us reads to our son most nights. He is not a child who sits still, and plenty of books lost him by the second page. So the reading changed. Long chapters got shorter. The frightening parts got softer. His own name went into the story, and he was no longer listening to a tale about a boy who found a beanstalk. He had found it, and that was the evening he stopped getting up. We are not trying to replace the books on your shelf, and we couldn't. But no paper book can put your child's name in its sentences. Growing Stories is that, built properly, so it can happen in other houses too.

Old stories, rewritten by hand

The library is built from classics old enough that anyone may retell them: Treasure Island, the Three Little Pigs, Jack and the Beanstalk. Each one is read, cut and rewritten for the age it is meant for, then read out loud to a child before it goes anywhere near yours. We could fill this app with a thousand more by the end of the month. We are not going to. A short shelf someone stands behind is worth more to a child than an endless one nobody read. New books arrive from time to time, when they are ready and not before, and there is room for this to become more than a shelf of old classics.

What happens when the page turns

Our son reads the same story over and over, and still waits to see what the next page does. So every page is written to hand you to the one after it, and every picture is made for the page it sits on, and made again when it isn't right. Sometimes one carries on across the turn, so the reveal arrives slowly rather than all at once. Nothing here marks a story as finished, because a story a child asks for again is the one that worked.

One story, one sitting

We think children are better off with less time on a screen, not more, and this is built to be used that way. A story is one sitting: twenty-odd pages, short enough that a four-year-old reaches the end before their attention runs out, with nothing interrupting it and nothing queued behind it. No streaks or badges, and nothing that makes a child uneasy about stopping. When a story ends, the app ends with it. Closing the book should feel like closing a book.

What this costs us

Here is where the money goes.

The stories: our evenings, unpaid
The covers and the pictures: a few hundred dollars so far
The software we write and build with: $110 a month
The server, database and name: $5 a month, plus $15 a year
Email and picture hosting: free, for now
The licence to be on a phone: $99 a year
All together: about $125 a month

Prices as of August 2026, in US dollars. What you pay is in your own currency and differs by country, and the shop you bought it in keeps a share.

Nobody takes a wage out of this. What's left pays for the next book, and we'll say here if it stops being enough.

If a page doesn't work for your child, tell us. Every message comes straight to the table this was built on. Or write to support@growingstories.app.