familycop

Most “family safety” apps want a subscription, a login on every device, and a running feed of where your kid is and what they tap. familycop is the opposite. It filters at the DNS level — the layer that turns a name like example.com into an address — so the blocking happens before a device ever loads the page. No agent on the phone. No spyware. No monthly fee.

You point your network (or a specific device) at a DNS profile you own and control, set the rules once, and adjust them whenever you want. It’s the same technique big networks use, scaled down to a household — and it stays yours.

How it works

It’s two free pieces wired together:

• NextDNS does the filtering — block categories (adult, gambling, malware), block or allow specific domains, enforce SafeSearch and YouTube Restricted Mode, and see a query log so you actually know what’s going on.
• Cloudflare gives you a clean way to apply that profile across your home and to schedule it (e.g. homework hours vs. weekends) without touching each device by hand.

You own both accounts. You hold the keys. Nothing phones home to me.

What you’ll need

• A domain you control (for the tidy, schedulable setup) — optional if you only want a single NextDNS profile.
• A free NextDNS account.
• About 20 minutes.

Make it your own

familycop is a starting point, not a cage. The whole thing is config you can read and change: loosen a category as the kids get older, add a site they need for school, tighten things back down for a weekend. Because it’s DNS, the rules travel with the network — not a brittle app that breaks on the next OS update.

TODO: the exact step-by-step setup (profile IDs, the Cloudflare wiring, the scheduling rules) lives in the repo and is the source of truth: github.com/matevisky/familycop. Follow the README there for the current, tested commands.