Comparison
BeehiveKin and Famly, for childminders in England
Famly does the money side and BeehiveKin does not. If invoicing and taking payments are what you need, buy Famly. If what you need is the contracts, consents and register in one place, and you would rather pay £20 than £29, this is the other way round.
BeehiveKin
£20 a month, or £200 a year
up to 12 children. 14-day free trial, no card. No VAT charged.
Famly
£29 a month, for up to 10 children
Famly advertises a free trial with "No commitment. No credit cards." Its page does not say whether VAT is on top.
Both read from the companies’ own pages on 27 October 2026. Prices change; check before you buy.
Where Famly is the better choice
Invoicing, batch invoicing and in-app payments
This is the honest gap. Famly bills your families and takes the money; BeehiveKin has invoicing on the roadmap and nothing in the product today. If that is your pain, nothing else in this comparison matters.
Instant messaging with parents
Live in Famly today. BeehiveKin has it built and switched off until the parent app ships, which means it is not a feature you can use.
A bigger company behind it
Famly is an established product with a support team and a long customer list. BeehiveKin is new and small, and for some buyers that alone settles it.
Where BeehiveKin is
£20 against £29, and 12 children against 10
A childminder at the English ratio limit can be over Famly’s cap and under ours. Yearly is £200, which is £40 saved.
Contracts and the statutory consents, signed on a phone
Parents sign from an emailed link with no account. The consent record keeps the date given and the date withdrawn, which is the part that matters when an inspector asks.
A register that tells the truth about arrival times
Set the time the child actually arrived rather than the moment you reached your phone, with every correction logged.
Built for England, not adapted to it
EYFS consents, an Ofsted URN at signup, records in the UK and Ireland. Famly sells across several countries, which is a strength for them and a dilution for you.
Side by side
| BeehiveKin | Famly | |
|---|---|---|
| Published price, better in BeehiveKin | £20/month, £200/year | £29/month |
| Children included, better in BeehiveKin | Up to 12 | Up to 10 |
| Invoicing and in-app payments, better in them | No, on the roadmap | Yes, including batch invoicing |
| Parent messaging, better in them | Built, switched off | Yes, instant messaging |
| Childcare contracts with e-signatures, better in BeehiveKin | Yes | Not listed |
| Statutory consents, with withdrawal recorded, better in BeehiveKin | Yes | Not listed |
| Daily register, better in about equal | Yes, corrected times logged | Yes, sign in and out |
| Observations and assessment, better in them | Yes, with next steps | Yes, plus activity and room planners |
| Accident and medication forms, better in them | Records kept, no dedicated form | Yes, with body maps |
| Parents need an account, better in BeehiveKin | No | Yes |
| Free trial, better in about equal | 14 days, no card | Yes, no card |
The highlighted cell is the one we think wins that row, including when it is not ours.
What BeehiveKin does not do
The same list on every one of these pages, because you should not have to find it out after you have moved your records.
- No invoicing. Fees, funded hours and consumables are on the roadmap and not in the product today.
- No occupancy tracking.
- No in-app parent messaging. It is built and switched off until the parent app ships.
- The mobile apps are not in the stores yet, so the first cohort uses it in a browser.
- Accounts are opened by hand, so there is a form rather than a signup button.
Most of that is being built. What is coming, and in what order, is below.
What is coming next
In the order it is being built. No dates, because a date on a page like this is a promise, and the order is the part we can keep.
- 1Invoicing, funded hours and feesThe largest gap, and the one being worked on first. Funded hours, private fees and consumables, built from the register rather than retyped.
- 2Parent messagingAlready built and switched off, because a provider arriving on the promise of in-app chat should not find nobody on the other end. It turns on with the parent app.
- 3The apps in the storesToday the first cohort uses BeehiveKin in a browser, which works on a phone. The iOS and Android listings follow.
- 4A second login for your assistantOne account per setting today. Staff logins are what will let an assistant, or a nursery room leader, have their own access.
- 5OccupancyA real picture of your week rather than a headcount. Later than the rest, and listed here so nobody is surprised by its absence.
Moving your records in
There is no automatic import from another app, and building one that handled every system properly would take longer than doing it by hand at this size. So we do it by hand, with you, free, before you pay anything.
Children, guardians and contact details
Send us your export or your spreadsheet and we load it. This is the part that takes an evening if you type it yourself, and it is the part we would rather do for you.
Contracts and consents
Signed again through BeehiveKin, by link, from the parent’s own phone. That is not laziness about importing: a signature captured in another system is that system’s evidence, and a fresh one with its own audit trail is worth more to you at inspection.
Learning journeys
Export them from your current app as PDFs and keep them, or hand them to families. We can attach them to each child so the history sits beside the new entries.
A term boundary is the easy moment
Most settings move at the start of a term and start the register fresh. It is less work than mid-year, and nothing is lost either way.
If you are already on Famly
If you are on Famly for the invoicing, do not switch yet. Wait for ours, or stay; we would rather say that than sell you a gap. If you never used the money features, the paperwork moves over in an afternoon and we do the moving: send us the children and families, and the contracts and consents are re-signed by link, which parents do from their own phones in a couple of minutes each.
Sources
- Famly childminder page, read 27 October 2026