Heddy is an AI tutoring app for UK students aged 13 and over. It opens without an account, so your child can be using it without you knowing — which is exactly why this page exists, written by the people who built it.

Here is the honest account of what it does, what it holds, and what it will never do.

What it is

Eight AI tutors — a guide called Heddy, plus seven subject professors covering maths, English, the three sciences, history and geography — and a flashcard system.

The distinguishing feature, and the reason the app exists, is a refusal: the tutors will not give your child the answer to their homework. They walk a four-rung hint ladder whose top rung is a fully worked similar problem, followed by "now redo yours". There is no fifth rung, and it isn't a personality setting a determined teenager can argue their way past — the code has no path to one.

If your worry about AI and homework is that it does the homework, this app is the argument against that.

What happens if a conversation stops being about school

This is the question that matters most, so it gets a direct answer.

Any safeguarding indicator in any room, with any tutor, hard-fails to one fixed line:

If you're struggling, please talk to a parent or call Childline 0800 1111.

It is not a paraphrase the model composes. It's a fixed response that overrides whatever lesson was in progress, and no tutor is able to be talked out of it. It is tested before every release.

Heddy is also not a companion app. She's drawn as a snowy owl and written as a guide — she'll notice you've had a hard week and make the plan smaller — but the app is built to avoid being a friend substitute, which is a real and current risk with AI chat products aimed at teenagers.

What you will not be able to see

You will not be shown your child's conversations. Not in a parent app, not in an email digest, not on request.

That's a decision, and I'd rather defend it than hide it. A tutoring room where a fourteen-year-old admits they don't understand something they were taught two years ago only works if it isn't being read over their shoulder. The moment it's a monitored channel, it becomes a performance, and they stop saying the one thing that would let a tutor help.

What you get instead, if your child asks you to unlock more tutoring, is a guardian email: a receipt for anything paid, and a route by which we can contact you if we ever need to. Not a feed.

If that trade-off isn't the one you want to make — and it's a legitimate thing to want — the main aitutors.me service is the other product. It's parent-provisioned, and it gives you a dashboard, a termly report and a view of the journey.

What's recorded

There's no account, but that doesn't mean nothing is stored, and I won't pretend otherwise.

From the first meaningful action, a learner record exists on our servers holding points, cards and session history, tied to the device rather than to a name, an email or an address. If you later subscribe, that record transfers into your household intact — nothing your child did beforehand is lost.

Conversation logging runs on a 30-day rolling deletion. No third party trains models on your child's conversations; that's explicit in the privacy policy and the terms, not just a stated intention.

The things it deliberately won't do to your child

These are constraints in the build, not guidelines someone remembers:

  • No streak-loss guilt. Momentum language only. Never "you'll lose your streak".
  • No countdowns, no artificial scarcity, no "offer ends".
  • No purchase prompt during a session. The screen shown when free tutoring runs out contains no price at all — it offers flashcards and "remind me tomorrow".
  • No notification permission prompt before your child has seen the product.

Much of this maps to the ICO's Age Appropriate Design Code, which treats nudge techniques aimed at minors as a compliance matter. We'd rather be unable to do those things than merely intending not to.

Why 13+, and why UK only

Both are deliberate limits rather than a market Heddy hasn't reached yet.

An app anyone can open without an adult has to be honest about its audience. The obligations owed to children under 13 — under COPPA, and under the Children's Code — are meaningfully stricter, and a no-signup product cannot meet them with a straight face. For a younger child, the parent-provisioned route is the right one, and it exists.

What to do if you've just found it on their phone

Three practical suggestions.

Ask to see a session, once. Not to audit it — to see the hint ladder work. It's the fastest way to tell this apart from an answer machine.

Look at their flashcard shelf. It's a fair picture of what they've actually been working on, subject by subject, without reading a word of anything private.

If you want the parent view, use the other product. They're built for different situations and it's fine to move.

Updated 10 Sep 2026. Written by Duke Harewood, who builds the tutors at aitutors.me.