Heddy opens straight into the product. No account, no email, no password, no permission prompts, and no adult's decision standing between you and the first question you wanted to ask.
What the first thirty seconds actually are
Three slides, skippable, with Skip sitting quietly in the top right.
Slide one — who she is. Heddy, large and centred, awake and attentive. "Hi — I'm Heddy. I'll point you at the right tutor, and keep an eye on the kind of week you're having."
Slide two — what the tutors do. Heddy in her focused mood, the room hinted behind her. "Eight tutors who won't hand you the answer. They'll walk you to it — a hint at a time — until you get it yourself." This slide carries the product's actual promise and is the one we're most careful about the wording of.
Slide three — the cards. "Your sessions turn into cards. Practise them whenever. Stuck on one? Take it straight back to your tutor." One full-width green button: Start learning.
That's it. No "create your account to continue", no notification permission on slide two, no "allow us to personalise your experience". Anything that involves a grown-up comes later and by your own tap.
Why it's built this way
Because until now, there was no door a teenager could open alone.
Every route into this product ran through an adult's decision — an adult's Claude or ChatGPT account, or a login an adult set up on a website. That works fine for a parent who has already decided to buy tutoring. It works not at all for a fifteen-year-old who heard the name from a friend at lunch and has a physics problem tonight.
An app that asks that student for an email address before showing them anything has, in practice, asked them to go and ask a parent. Most won't. So we don't ask.
What's happening underneath (the honest version)
"No account" does not mean "nothing is recorded", and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise.
The moment you do something that needs a real record — start a session with a professor, adopt a card — the app quietly creates one for you on our servers. It's a real learner record; it just isn't attached to a name, an email or a person. You're never asked to make it, and you never see it.
The reason to do it that way rather than keeping everything on the phone is the thing that happens later. If a parent eventually subscribes, that record is reassigned into their household rather than copied — every point, every card, every session you had before they were involved, intact and continuous. The alternative, storing it all locally, means starting again on the day someone decides to pay, which is exactly the wrong moment to lose four months of work.
What Heddy still won't do to you
No account also doesn't mean no rules. The first run deliberately contains none of the standard acquisition machinery:
- No countdown, no "offer ends", no artificial scarcity
- No streak threat, ever — momentum language only
- No notification permission prompt before you've seen the product
- No purchase prompt at any point during an actual session
Some of that is taste. Most of it is that the ICO's Children's Code treats nudge techniques aimed at minors as a compliance matter rather than a growth tactic, and building the app so it can't do those things is easier than remembering not to.
The age floor, stated plainly
Heddy is for 13 and over, in the UK. That's not a formality.
A product that anyone can open without an adult is a product that must be honest about who it's built for, and the protections that apply to children under 13 are stricter than a no-signup app can meet with a straight face. If you're a parent of a younger child, the main aitutors.me service is the route — parent-provisioned, exactly as the rules for that age reasonably require.
Updated 10 Sep 2026. Written by Duke Harewood, who builds the tutors at aitutors.me.