- Starting price
- Free to download; in-app subscription price not published
- Free tier
- Yes
- Platforms
- iOS 13.0+ · iPadOS 13.0+ · macOS 11.0+ (M1 or later) · visionOS 1.0+ · Android
- Developer
- Orange / The reThink Group, Inc.
- Launched
- 2011
- Updated
- Jul 26, 2026
The verdict
The free tier is the recommendation: a well-made, low-pressure phase-based parenting companion with a 4.8 average from 2,385 ratings and fifteen years of continuous release history behind it. The paid tier is impossible to assess, because Orange does not publish its price on any page it controls - and the videos that carry most of the app's weight stop at preteen, so parents of teenagers get the least from paying.
Try Parent Cue ↗Opens theparentcue.org
Parent Cue is the parenting-side companion to Orange's children's and youth curriculum, and it has been on the App Store since April 2011 - a fifteen-year run that puts it among the oldest continuously maintained apps in this category. The current build is 9.0.10, dated 11 April 2026, and the store record is unusually strong: 4.8 from 2,385 ratings, rated 4+, filed under Lifestyle, published by The reThink Group, Inc. Sustained scores at that volume are hard to fake and harder to maintain across fifteen years of releases.
The mechanism is deliberately simple. You enter each child's name and birth date, and the app works out which "phase" that child is in - Baby at nought, Toddler at one, Preschool from two to five, Elementary from kindergarten through third grade, Preteen for fourth and fifth, Middle School for sixth through eighth, High School for ninth through twelfth. From then on it serves content matched to that phase, one week at a time: a memory verse, a faith or Bible-story video, devotional prompts, and what Orange calls "parent cue times" - suggested moments in an ordinary day to say something to your child. Multiple children live on one account, each on their own phase track. The interface runs in English and Spanish.
Layered on top is a paid in-app subscription, added in version 8.0.0. Orange's help site describes it as "a paid subscription where parents can receive weekly phase cues, monthly resources, and an annual overview," available "through Apple or Android stores on monthly or annual terms" and cancelable at any time. What Orange does not describe is what it costs. There is no figure on theparentcue.org, none in the FAQ, and none on the Orange help page. Apple's listing says "Free · In-App Purchases" and nothing more specific. To find out what you would pay, you have to go to a store and start the purchase flow. No free trial is mentioned anywhere.
That gap is the reason this review spends as much time on pricing as on features. The free tier is easy to endorse - it costs nothing, it asks for very little data, and Orange's FAQ commits in plain words to not selling or sharing it. The paid tier cannot be endorsed or dismissed, only flagged, because the single most important number about it is not published. And the vendor's own documented limits sharpen the point: phase videos are provided for Toddler through Preteen and, in Orange's words, "not Middle/High School." The parents most likely to want structured help are the ones the paid tier serves least.
✓ The good
- Genuinely free at the level most families need - the weekly memory verse, phase videos, devotional content and parent cue times all sit on the free tier, with no trial clock attached
- The phase model does real work - a name and a birth date is the entire setup, and the app then tracks a child from nought to eighteen without you re-choosing an age band every year
- Multiple children on one account, each on their own phase - a household with a toddler and a fourth-grader gets two different content streams rather than an average of the two
- A remarkable store record: 4.8 from 2,385 ratings, first released April 2011, last updated 11 April 2026 - fifteen years of continuous maintenance and a high score at meaningful volume
- Unusually clear privacy language from the vendor - the FAQ states that Orange "will not share or sell your personal information or information about your child to any outside organizations," and a child profile holds only a name and a birth date
- Bilingual interface (English and Spanish) and a broad platform footprint - iOS and iPadOS 13.0+, Android, macOS 11.0+ on Apple silicon, and Apple Vision visionOS 1.0+
- Church connection lets a family's own congregation customise what they see, which is what turns the app from a generic devotional feed into something aligned with what a child hears on Sunday
✗ Watch out
- The subscription price is published nowhere Orange controls - not on theparentcue.org, not in the FAQ, not on the Orange help site - and no free trial is mentioned anywhere, so evaluating the paid tier means buying it and cancelling
- Phase videos are provided for Toddler through Preteen only - Orange states they are "not Middle/High School," so the paid proposition thins out sharply exactly where parents of teenagers need it most
- "Videos are English-only" despite the app itself running in English and Spanish - a Spanish-speaking household gets a translated interface wrapped around untranslated video
- Videos are YouTube-hosted, which implies a live connection and no offline viewing, and Orange warns that "full-screen video rotation may not function on certain tablets due to YouTube hosting restrictions"
- "No multi-user account feature; shared login only" - two parents cannot hold separate logins, so one household account is passed between them
- "Archive content is not available in-app, though previous videos exist on YouTube" - miss a week and the app will not show it to you again; you go looking on YouTube instead
Best for
- Parents of toddlers through preteens
- Families already inside an Orange church
- Households wanting one free, low-effort weekly prompt
- Parents tracking several children at different ages
Avoid if
- Your children are all teenagers
- You need Spanish-language video, not just interface
- You want two separate parent logins
- You need offline or archived content
What Parent Cue is
Parent Cue is a free parenting companion app from Orange, the children's and youth curriculum publisher. A parent enters each child's name and birth date; the app maps that to a developmental "phase" and serves content matched to it, one week at a time. Each week brings a memory verse for that child, a faith or Bible-story video, devotional prompts, and "parent cue times" - suggested moments in the day to talk with the child about what they are learning.
The paid in-app subscription layers phase-specific monthly resources, downloads and a year-long phase overview on top of the weekly rhythm. Several children can sit on one account, each on their own phase. The interface is available in English and Spanish, and a family's church can connect to the account and customise part of what that family sees.
Why parents keep Parent Cue installed when other apps get deleted
Most family faith apps are built for the child and hope a parent will supervise. Parent Cue is built for the parent and hopes the child will overhear. That inversion is the whole design. There is no game loop, no streak, no reward economy and nothing for a child to open on their own; there is a weekly verse, a short video, a devotional prompt and a suggestion about when to raise it. The commitment being asked for is a few minutes a week from an adult, which is a far more realistic ask than another daily habit for a seven-year-old.
The phase framework is what makes that ask sustainable across a whole childhood. Because setup is a name and a birth date, the app advances a child through Baby, Toddler, Preschool, Elementary, Preteen, Middle School and High School without the parent doing anything, and Orange says the app is "primarily geared for parents of children ages 0 - 18." Households with several children get several parallel tracks on one login. And when the family's church is connected, the customised content lines up with what the child actually heard on Sunday - which is the practical argument for using this app over a generic devotional feed.
Phases: a birth date is the whole configuration
The setup step is the feature. You add a child, give a name and a birth date, and Parent Cue assigns a phase: Baby at nought, Toddler at one, Preschool across two to five, Elementary from kindergarten to third grade, Preteen for fourth and fifth, Middle School for sixth through eighth, High School for ninth through twelfth. Everything downstream keys off that. Weekly content, the memory verse, the video, the devotional prompts and the parenting insights are all selected for the phase rather than chosen by the parent from a catalogue. Multiple children live on one account, each with their own phase, so the app is serving two or three different streams at once in a typical household. On the paid tier the phase also produces a year-long overview - a look at the whole coming twelve months for that stage - alongside monthly resources and downloads.
The reason this matters is that curation is the expensive part of parenting a child's faith formation, and the birth date does it for free. A parent who opens the app is not browsing; they are being handed the one thing suited to this child, this week. It also means the app stays useful for fifteen or sixteen years rather than the two or three that a fixed-age product manages, since the child's phase advances on its own. The limitation to hold alongside that is coverage: the phase structure runs from nought to eighteen, but the video content does not. Orange provides phase videos for Toddler, Preschool, Elementary and Preteen, and states plainly that videos are "not Middle/High School." Devotional content begins at kindergarten level. So the framework spans the whole of childhood while the richest content sits in the middle of it - excellent for a household of primary-school children, noticeably thinner for one with two teenagers.
The weekly rhythm: one verse, one video, and cue times
Each week the app surfaces four things for each child. A memory verse chosen for that phase. A phase video - a faith or Bible-story clip, available for Toddler through Preteen. Devotional content and prompts, provided from kindergarten level upward. And parent cue times: suggested moments to bring the week's idea up with that child, which is the part of the app doing the least technically and possibly the most practically. Underneath sits phase-specific parenting insight - what tends to be true of a child at this stage - with monthly resources, downloads and the annual overview reserved for subscribers. The videos are hosted on YouTube, which has two consequences the vendor documents: a live connection is required, so there is no offline viewing, and "full-screen video rotation may not function on certain tablets due to YouTube hosting restrictions."
Two further limits shape how this rhythm behaves in real life. First, it is genuinely weekly and genuinely disposable: "archive content is not available in-app, though previous videos exist on YouTube." Miss a fortnight and the app will not offer you the backlog - you either let it go or go hunting on YouTube yourself. For a parent who wants a single low-guilt prompt each week that is arguably a feature, since there is no growing pile of unwatched material. For a parent who wants to work through a sequence, it is a real constraint. Second, "videos are English-only," even though the interface runs in English and Spanish. A Spanish-speaking household therefore gets a Spanish app around English video, which for the phases where video carries most of the weight is a significant asymmetry rather than a cosmetic one.
Church connection - and what a church is not allowed to change
Parent Cue can be connected to a family's church, and the church can then customise part of what those families see. This is the mechanism that distinguishes the app from a generic devotional: when a congregation runs Orange curriculum, the weekly verse and story a parent is prompted about can be the same one the child heard in their classroom that Sunday, which turns the app into a home extension of a Sunday programme rather than a second, unrelated track. Orange documents the boundaries of that customisation carefully. Church-customisable content carries character-count restrictions, and three things cannot be customised at all: the times cues, the Parent Cue links, and ads.
That last item deserves precision rather than inference. The only published evidence that advertising exists inside the app is that "ads" appears in the list of items a church cannot customise. Orange does not describe the app as ad-supported anywhere, and Apple lists it simply as "Free · In-App Purchases." So the honest statement is exactly that: the word appears in a non-customisable list, and nothing more is published. The other structural limit on the church side is commercial: bulk purchasing is unavailable, which means a church cannot buy subscriptions for its families even if it wants to fund them. A children's pastor can align the free content their families receive, and can recommend the paid tier, but every subscription remains an individual store purchase by an individual parent - at a price the church cannot quote either.
Pricing
Free
Free
The app itself, at no cost. Add each child by name and birth date, then receive weekly phase-appropriate content: a memory verse, phase videos for Toddler through Preteen, devotional content from kindergarten level, and parent cue times. Multiple children on one account. Apple lists the app as "Free · In-App Purchases."
In-app subscription - monthly
Price not published
Introduced in version 8.0.0 and described by Orange as "monthly or annual, cancelable anytime." Adds phase-specific monthly resources and downloads plus a year-long phase overview on top of the weekly cues. Orange publishes no dollar figure on any page it controls; the amount appears only inside the App Store or Google Play purchase flow.
In-app subscription - annual
Price not published
The same subscription on annual terms, purchased "through Apple or Android stores." Again, no published price. Bulk purchasing is unavailable, so a church cannot buy subscriptions on behalf of its families - every subscription is an individual store transaction by a parent.
The app is free to download. Apple's listing reads "Free · In-App Purchases," and the substantive weekly content - memory verse, phase video, devotional prompts, parent cue times, multiple children on one account - is on the free tier. For a large share of families that is the whole product, and it costs nothing.
The paid tier is an in-app subscription introduced in version 8.0.0. Orange's help site describes it as "a paid subscription where parents can receive weekly phase cues, monthly resources, and an annual overview," available "through Apple or Android stores on monthly or annual terms" and described as "monthly or annual, cancelable anytime." What it adds, then, is phase-specific monthly resources and downloads plus a year-long overview for each child's stage.
What Orange does not say, anywhere it controls, is the price. Not on theparentcue.org. Not in the FAQ. Not on the Orange help page for the app. There is no dollar amount to quote here, and this review will not estimate one. The only way to learn the cost is to open the App Store or Google Play listing and begin a purchase. That is a poor arrangement for a product aimed at parents, who are exactly the audience most likely to want to compare a recurring charge against the household budget before tapping anything.
No free trial is mentioned anywhere either. So evaluating the paid tier means subscribing and then cancelling if it does not fit - which the vendor at least makes explicit is possible at any time. An annual term exists, but with neither the monthly nor the annual figure published, the usual question of whether annual is worth committing to cannot be answered from outside.
Two structural notes for anyone budgeting around this. Because the subscription is an in-app purchase, it is a store transaction with store cancellation rules rather than a vendor-side account. And because bulk purchasing is unavailable, a church cannot buy subscriptions on behalf of its families - there is no institutional route to paying for this on a parent's behalf.
Where Parent Cue falls behind
The unpublished price is the biggest problem, and it is a self-inflicted one. Orange describes the subscription's contents and terms in writing, in two places, and never states the amount. A parent who wants to know what a monthly or annual commitment costs must go to a store and start buying. Every serious competitor in the family-faith space publishes its price on its own site; a vendor that does not is asking for trust at exactly the moment it should be offering clarity. There is no suggestion of anything underhand here - only that the most consequential fact about the paid tier lives somewhere the vendor's own pages never take you.
Video coverage stops before adolescence. Phase videos are provided for Toddler, Preschool, Elementary and Preteen, and Orange states they are "not Middle/High School." The phase framework itself runs to eighteen and the app is marketed for parents of children nought to eighteen, so the shape of the product and the shape of its content do not match. For a parent of a fourteen-year-old, the weekly video - the single most tangible thing the app delivers - is absent, and the value of paying drops accordingly.
Spanish speakers get half a translation. The interface is bilingual; the videos are not. "Videos are English-only" is the vendor's own phrasing, and it means a Spanish-language household navigates a Spanish app to reach English content. In the Toddler-through-Preteen phases where video does most of the work, that is not a minor gap.
The YouTube dependency has visible edges. Videos are YouTube-hosted, which implies a live connection and no offline viewing - no downloading the week's clip before a long drive or a flight, which is precisely when a parent of small children might want it. Orange also warns that "full-screen video rotation may not function on certain tablets due to YouTube hosting restrictions," so on some hardware the viewing experience is degraded by the hosting choice rather than by the app.
One login per household, and no way back to last week. "No multi-user account feature; shared login only" means two parents cannot hold separate accounts for the same children - they share credentials, and the FAQ's guidance is that the same account can be registered on a second device with identical credentials. Separately, "archive content is not available in-app, though previous videos exist on YouTube," so there is no in-app history at all. Between them, these two limits mean the app cannot answer either "what did my spouse see?" or "what did we miss last month?" without leaving it.
Parent Cue vs. Minno vs. TruPlay Games
These three sit in the same aisle and solve different problems. Parent Cue is a parent-facing prompt engine: free, weekly, no child-facing surface at all, with a memory verse and a short video and a suggestion about when to raise the subject. Minno is a children's streaming service - a catalogue of faith-based shows a child watches, at 4.5 from 1,700 App Store ratings, on the store since October 2013. TruPlay is a games platform for roughly four to twelve, at 4.5 from 3,390 ratings and released in June 2023. If the question is "what does my child do on a screen," Parent Cue is the wrong product entirely; if the question is "what do I say to my child this week," the other two do not answer it.
On price the comparison is lopsided in Parent Cue's favour and then immediately complicated. Parent Cue's substantive content is free, with an optional subscription whose cost Orange does not publish. Minno and TruPlay are both free to download and subscription-driven for the content that matters. So the honest summary is that Parent Cue is the cheapest of the three to actually use, because you can use it properly at no cost - and simultaneously the hardest to price, because if you do want the paid tier you cannot find out what it costs without opening a purchase flow.
On store signal Parent Cue leads: 4.8 from 2,385 ratings, first released April 2011 and last updated 11 April 2026. That is a higher average than either Minno or TruPlay at a comparable volume, on a release history nearly twelve years longer than TruPlay's. Treat that as evidence about retention rather than about content depth - it tells you that parents who install this tend to keep it and rate it well, which for a product whose entire ask is a few minutes a week is the metric that matters most. The sensible household answer is often both: Parent Cue for the parent, and one of the child-facing services for the child.
The bottom line
Install the free version. Parent Cue is a well-judged, low-pressure piece of software that asks for a name and a birth date and gives back one verse, one video, one devotional prompt and a suggestion about when to talk - and it has held a 4.8 average across 2,385 ratings while shipping continuously since April 2011, which is about as good a signal of quiet usefulness as this category produces. Orange's privacy language is unusually plain, the data it holds on a child is a name and a birth date, and connecting your church makes the weekly prompt match what your child actually heard on Sunday. The paid tier is a different matter, and not because it looks bad: it is that Orange publishes no price for it on any page it controls, offers no trial, and provides no phase videos for Middle or High School, so the parents most likely to pay for structure are the ones getting the least. Take the free tier, which is genuinely good. Treat the subscription as something to price in a store and judge for yourself, and if your children are teenagers, look hard at what you would actually be buying.
Alternatives to Parent Cue
MinnoThe child-facing counterpart rather than a competitor: a faith-based kids' streaming catalogue at 4.5 from 1,700 App Store ratings, on the store since October 2013 and still shipping updates.
TruPlay GamesA subscription games platform for younger children - 4.5 from 3,390 ratings, released June 2023. Answers the "what does my child play" question that Parent Cue deliberately does not touch.
Bible App for KidsYouVersion's free illustrated Bible-story app for young children. Worth pairing with Parent Cue: one gives the parent the weekly prompt, the other gives the child something to open.
LightglidersA Christian virtual world for roughly six to fourteen, at 4.2 from 100 App Store ratings - a small feedback base, and its last iOS update was January 2025.Frequently asked questions
Is Parent Cue free?
The app is free to download - Apple lists it as "Free · In-App Purchases" - and the core weekly content sits on the free tier: a memory verse per child, phase videos for Toddler through Preteen, devotional content from kindergarten level, parent cue times, and multiple children on one account. There is also a paid in-app subscription, added in version 8.0.0, which adds phase-specific monthly resources and downloads plus a year-long phase overview.
How much does the Parent Cue subscription cost?
Orange does not publish a price anywhere it controls. Not on theparentcue.org, not in the app FAQ, and not on the Orange help site - all of which describe what the subscription includes and that it is available "through Apple or Android stores on monthly or annual terms," without stating an amount. The only way to find out is to open the App Store or Google Play listing and begin a purchase. We will not estimate a figure. No free trial is mentioned anywhere either, though Orange does describe the subscription as "monthly or annual, cancelable anytime," so evaluating it means subscribing and cancelling if it does not suit you.
What ages is Parent Cue for?
Orange says it is "primarily geared for parents of children ages 0 - 18," and the published phases are Baby (0), Toddler (1), Preschool (2-5), Elementary (K-3rd), Preteen (4th-5th), Middle School (6th-8th) and High School (9th-12th). Note the content asymmetry: phase videos are provided for Toddler through Preteen and, in Orange's words, "not Middle/High School," while devotional content starts at kindergarten level.
What data does it hold about my child?
A child profile contains only a name and a birth date, "stored on secure servers." The FAQ states that "Orange, the company behind the Parent Cue app, will not share or sell your personal information or information about your child to any outside organizations." Apple's privacy label lists data not linked to your identity - including precise location, email, name and crash data - collected for app functionality and diagnostics.
Can both parents have their own login?
No. Orange states there is "no multi-user account feature; shared login only," so a household shares one account. The FAQ does note that the same account can be registered on a second device using identical credentials, which is how two parents typically use it in practice.
Which devices does it run on?
It is on both the Apple App Store and Google Play. Apple lists iOS 13.0 or later, iPadOS 13.0 or later, macOS 11.0 or later on a Mac with Apple M1 or later, and Apple Vision with visionOS 1.0 or later. One thing to plan around: the videos are YouTube-hosted, so a live connection is required and there is no offline viewing, and Orange warns that full-screen video rotation may not work on certain tablets because of YouTube hosting restrictions.
Does the app contain adverts?
This cannot be answered definitively from published material, and it is worth being precise. The only published evidence that ads exist in the app is that "ads" appears in a list of items a church cannot customise, alongside the times cues and the Parent Cue links. Orange does not describe the app as ad-supported anywhere, and Apple lists it as "Free · In-App Purchases." So: the word appears in a non-customisable list, and nothing further is published.
Sources & further reading
- Parent Cue - app page (phases, weekly content, church connection) ↗
- Parent Cue - homepage (positioning, phase framework) ↗
- Parent Cue - FAQ (age range, privacy commitments, second-device registration, video limits) ↗
- Orange help centre - Parent Cue FAQs (subscription terms, church customisation limits, bulk purchasing) ↗
- Apple App Store - Parent Cue (rating, seller, version, platform requirements, privacy label) ↗
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