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Signing up starts with one question: your birth year. What happens next depends on the answer.

1. Eighteen or over — you set up the account. You can be the reader yourself, or set up profiles for the people you look after.
2. Thirteen to seventeen — you can set up your own account after ticking an acknowledgement that a parent or guardian should know about it.
3. Under thirteen — a grown-up has to do this part. Nothing is created and nothing is stored for a child signing up alone.

After the email and password step we send a confirmation link. Opening it signs you in and takes you into setup — the account is not usable before that.

Setup asks who the account is for, then a name and birth year for the first reader, whether they are learning English in addition to another language, and a starting level. The birth year decides which band the reader begins in, and it is also what asks for a guardian confirmation when the reader is under thirteen.

After setup, Home lists every reader on the account and launches each one into reading.

The parent PIN is set on the Learners page. It belongs to the account rather than to any one reader, it is four digits, and it is stored hashed — nothing in the app can read it back to you.

Two things ask for it: leaving a reader’s profile to return to the account, and changing a reader’s display settings while those settings are locked.

Accessibility settings are never behind it. Text size, background colour, brightness, reduced motion and the reading fonts stay reachable to whoever is holding the device, and the banner on a locked settings page says which group is locked and which is not.

Five wrong entries close the gate for fifteen minutes. When that time has passed the gate opens again with a fresh five tries — waiting is the whole of the penalty, and a wrong try afterwards does not restart the clock from nothing.

There is a second, separate code you may never meet: an optional entry PIN on a teen or adult profile, set on that profile’s own settings page. Younger readers are never asked for one.

A forgotten parent PIN cannot currently be reset from inside the app. Changing it asks for the current one, and there is no other route to it. That is a gap we know about rather than a step you have missed.

A free account allows 15 minutes of reading aloud a day for each reader. On a paid account there is no limit. Paid plans are not on sale yet, so every account today is a free one.

The day is counted in the account’s own time zone, so it turns over at your midnight.

The check happens when a lesson starts, never partway through one. A lesson already underway always runs to its end.

A reader who has used the day’s minutes is shown a warm ending from the bee and nothing else — no plan, no limit named as a lack, and nothing to tap that costs money. That screen is deliberately the whole of what a reader is shown, and it is the same screen if they come back an hour later.

Listening in Storytime is recorded but does not count against this allowance. Only reading aloud does.

Readers are added on the Learners page. A free account holds 1 reader profile at a time; a paid account holds up to 5. Paid plans are not on sale yet, so every account today is a free one.

Adding one asks for a name and a birth year. The birth year sets the starting band. If the reader is under thirteen, an adult on the account confirms they are the parent or guardian and gives their own birth year before the profile is created — that confirmation comes first, and nothing is stored for the child until it does.

When an account is already at its limit, tapping “Add a learner” explains the limit instead of opening the form.

Moving between readers happens on the Switch screen. If the account has a parent PIN, leaving a reader asks for it.

1. Tap the microphone button once. The browser asks for permission the first time — choose Allow.
2. If Block was chosen earlier, the browser will not ask again. Open the padlock or site-settings menu beside the address bar, set the microphone back to Allow, and reload the page.
3. Check the address starts with https. Browsers refuse microphone access on an insecure connection.
4. Check no other tab, call or app is holding the microphone.
5. On a phone or tablet, check the browser itself is allowed to use the microphone in the device’s own settings.

When permission is refused the reading screen says so and waits. Nothing is lost — tapping the microphone again asks once more.

We ask the browser for the microphone, confirm it is available, and release it again straight away. Speech is assessed as it is spoken and no recording of a reader’s voice is kept.

If the bee steps in sooner or later than suits the reader, the silence it waits through before offering a hint is adjustable on each reader’s settings page.

Sound coming out is a separate matter from the microphone going in. If the bee is silent, check the device is not muted and that the page has been tapped at least once — browsers hold back audio until a page has been touched.