Six things parents ask us most. The short answers are below; the longer policy is on the about page.
We work in a pyramid: visited on top, then sponsored, then featured, with listed at the bottom. A venue starts as listed (auto-curated from public sources). Someone from our team visits in person with a baby or toddler, and only then is the entry promoted to visited. We never accept payment to skip the visit step.
The order on every borough page mirrors that pyramid: visited rows always sit above sponsored, sponsored above featured, featured above listed.
visited — our team has been to this venue in person with a baby or toddler.
sponsored — paid placement, ASA-labelled on the listing itself per the UK Advertising Standards Authority CAP Code. Money or measurable value has been exchanged. Sponsored placements never appear in the visited tier.
featured — editorial selection without money changing hands; typically a venue we have researched in depth but not yet visited in person.
listed — catalogued from public sources (scrape + LLM draft), not yet vetted by a human.
Today, nothing: no advertising, no affiliate links, no selling parent data. The directory is hand-curated by a small editorial team.
Our planned revenue model is a paid analytics surface for claimed venues — a monthly subscription (or a one-off fee) that gives venue owners visibility into bookers vs. browsers and which boroughs are sending visits. That's a venue-side product, not a parent-side product; parent-facing pages will always stay free, no walls, no logins required to browse.
We render every page as server-side HTML. No React Native, no JavaScript framework, no app-store install. Pages load on slow connections, work offline if you keep the tab open, and don't drain your phone battery while you are stood in the rain outside a soft-play café trying to read the opening hours.
Save it to your home screen and it behaves enough like an app for most uses.
Email hello@earlyedit.co.uk with the venue name, address, and what you run for babies and toddlers. We will add it as listed on our next pass. The promotion to visited happens when one of our editors makes it to the venue in person.
We only ask for your postcode area (e.g. "SE4"), not your full address, and we never share it with venues at the individual-parent level.
Once we ship venue analytics (see "How is Early Edit funded?"), claimed venues will get aggregated, anonymised metrics about visitors to their listing — booker vs. browser counts, postcode-area heatmaps — but never an identifiable parent's data. Our terms of service spell out exactly what aggregated metrics get shared.
Still have a question? Email hello@earlyedit.co.uk.