One license covers one parent and one kid. The second kid costs an additional $49, the third another $49, and so on. Siblings share the studio install, share the family gallery, share the approval queue. They do not share project folders. Two kids in one cohort is allowed. The older-kid / younger-kid dynamic is real and we have opinions about it.
The pricing math, in plain numbers
A single-track license is $99. That gives one kid the Game track or the Story track or the Site track or the Movie track, on one parent account, with the studio installed on the household’s computer. The all-four bundle is $149, which unlocks every track for that same kid.
For the second kid, the add-on is $49 on top of either base. So a family with two kids on the all-four bundle pays $149 + $49 = $198 total. A family with two kids on a single track pays $99 + $49 = $148. A family with three kids on the bundle pays $149 + $49 + $49 = $247.
The $49 add-on covers one additional kid. There is no annual fee on the license itself; the only recurring charge is the optional AI add-on ($30/mo or $300/yr) which applies to the parent account regardless of how many kids use it. The AI add-on is family-scope, not per-kid.
If you start with one kid and add a sibling later, the upgrade is also $49. You don’t pay a new full license; you pay the sibling add-on. The dashboard wires the new kid into the existing account on the same parent dashboard.
Why $49, and not "double everything"
Most kid software is priced per account. Two kids means two subscriptions. Some products price by seat. Two kids means two seats. Both of those models assume each kid is a separate customer with separate everything: separate logins, separate billing, separate support tickets. That is the SaaS default.
It is also the wrong default for families. Siblings are not duplicate customers. They share a household, a parent, a computer, a kitchen table. They probably saw each other’s projects before they had accounts of their own. If we charged $99 per kid we would be ignoring all of that.
The $49 second-kid price is the marginal cost of the second kid to us, plus a small margin. The second kid does not require a second parent account, a second dashboard, or a second support relationship. The studio install on the family computer already exists. What changes is the kid’s name on a profile, their own folder of projects, their own XP and badges. Forty-nine dollars covers that, and it leaves room for us to ship updates without raising prices later.
Mitchel Resnick’s long-standing argument that creative learning happens through Peers, one of the 4 Ps in his framework, is part of why this matters.1 A sibling is a Peer who already lives in the house. Pricing them out is pricing out the most natural Peer a kid has.
What the parent dashboard actually shows
The dashboard has one parent and N kids underneath it. There is no separate login per kid. The parent signs in once and sees a switcher at the top of the dashboard with each kid’s name and avatar. Click a name, see that kid’s projects. The studio itself, when launched, asks which kid is using it right now, and that’s the only login moment.
The approval queue is family-wide. If both kids ship something on the same Saturday, the parent sees two cards stacked in the queue. Each card shows whose project it is, what changed since last approval, and the Keep / Review / Undo decision row. You can approve both, or one and ask the other to revise, in the same sitting.
The gallery is shared. Both kids’ published projects show up on the same family gallery page at /gallery/yourfamily. Each kid can mark their own projects public or private; the default is private. We did this so a younger sibling can see what an older sibling shipped and feel like that is a thing they could ship too. The reverse also holds.
Project folders are not shared. Maya’s Pixel Castle Defense lives in Maya’s folder. Leo cannot accidentally edit it. The studio file bridge enforces per-kid scopes, which means each kid’s save files, characters, and assets stay in their own space even though the underlying install is one install.
Can siblings be in the same cohort?
Yes. Each kid enrolls in the cohort separately, which means each kid has their own seat and their own demo on demo night. If you put two siblings in the same Saturday morning cohort, they are both there together, but they are working on their own projects and presenting separately. The mentor knows they are siblings.
Some families prefer separate cohorts on different days, so the kids each get their own thing. Others prefer the same cohort because logistics. Both work. The cohort price is per kid regardless of sibling status; the sibling discount applies to the software license, not the mentored experience.
One thing we have learned watching siblings in the same cohort: they tend not to copy each other. The cohort structure (your own project, your own demo, peer questions) creates enough differentiation that the sibling competition mostly does not surface. Kids tend to lean into being different rather than the same.
The older-kid / younger-kid dynamic, named
This is the part most "sibling pricing" pages do not discuss. The dynamic between an older sibling who ships first and a younger sibling who watches is one of the most powerful learning forces in the studio, and it is also where parents can accidentally tip the scale the wrong way.
A younger sibling watching an older sibling ship is the closest thing the studio has to a built-in mentor. Don’t over-correct it by praising the older kid’s outcome. From watching cohort families
What we see most often: the older kid ships a project first, the younger kid is impressed, and the parent says something like "look how good Maya’s game is!" That is the wrong move, even though it feels generous. Carol Dweck’s research on praise found, across many studies, that praising the outcome (the finished game) makes the kid risk-averse the next time, and praising the effort (the iteration, the choices, the persistence) builds the durable thing.2 Praise the younger kid’s effort on whatever they are making, even if it is messier. Praise the older kid’s revision count, not the polish.
The second pattern: the younger kid often skips the slow part. They watched the older kid struggle through it, and they jump to imitating the polished output. That is fine for a while. It usually corrects on its own when the younger kid’s ambition outgrows what imitation gets them. The mentor in a cohort speeds that correction along.
The studio does not solve this dynamic. The studio just makes it visible, and visible is enough. You see both kids’ work, you can see who is iterating and who is coasting, and you can have the conversation with the right kid at the right moment. That is the family dashboard’s job. It is not a leaderboard. It is a window into who is doing the work.
References
- Mitchel Resnick, Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play, MIT Press, 2017. The 4 Ps framework names Peers as one of the four creative-learning engines.
- Carol S. Dweck, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Random House, 2006. See chapters on praise and on the contrast between effort-praise and ability-praise in school-age children.