Hand a ten-year-old a debit card and most parents feel a flicker of unease, even when the card is locked to a £15 weekly limit and every transaction pings straight to a parent's phone within seconds. That unease is exactly why four apps — GoHenry, Nimbl, Starling Kite and Revolut <18 — have built entire businesses around making children's money visible, controllable and, crucially, teachable. Choosing between them isn't really a question of which app looks nicest. It's a question of who holds the money, what happens if the provider goes under, and how much control you're willing to hand over to an eleven-year-old with a phone. September is when most families actually make this decision, once a new school year brings bus fares, canteen top-ups and the first requests for a "proper" card rather than cash in an envelope. Get the choice wrong at this age and you're usually stuck with it — cancelling a card a child has already personalised with their name and a cartoon dinosaur tends to provoke more tears than the £3-a-month fee ever justified.
How pocket-money apps actually work
All four services follow roughly the same shape: a parent opens an account in their own name, links a debit card or prepaid card for the child, sets a weekly or monthly allowance, and approves or blocks categories of spending from a companion app. Chores can be tied to payment in GoHenry and Nimbl, so a completed task triggers an automatic transfer rather than a parent remembering to hand over coins on a Friday. Starling Kite works differently — it isn't a separate product at all, but a card and a sub-account bolted onto an adult's existing Starling personal current account, which changes the protection picture more than most parents realise (more on that below). Revolut <18 sits inside the parent's own Revolut app as a linked profile, with spending limits, card freezing and real-time notifications controlled from the same screen the adult already uses for their own money.
None of these are full bank accounts in the legal sense a child could open independently. A GoHenry or Nimbl card draws on an electronic money account, not a current account, which matters when the FCA and FSCS get involved — and they do, in ways that catch most parents out.
GoHenry, Nimbl, Starling Kite and Revolut <18 compared
Here's the practical breakdown, based on what each provider actually charges and offers in 2026 rather than what the marketing pages emphasise:
- GoHenry: around £2.99 a month per child, prepaid card with a physical design the child can personalise, chore-linked payments, a "money missions" financial literacy course built into the app, and support for up to four children on one family plan without extra per-child admin.
- Nimbl: around £3.99 a month, broadly similar chore and allowance tools to GoHenry, and a savings feature that pays a small amount of interest on top — genuinely useful for a child who wants to watch a balance grow rather than just spend it.
- Starling Kite costs roughly £2 a month per child but only exists as an add-on, so the parent must already hold — or open — a Starling personal current account first.
- Revolut <18 is free on the Standard tier, though several of the more useful controls (spending insights, higher card limits, multiple currency support) only unlock properly if the parent is on a paid Revolut plan, currently £6.99 a month for Premium.
None of these prices include the card replacement fees that catch parents out later — GoHenry and Nimbl both charge roughly £5–£8 for a lost or damaged card, which adds up fast with two or three children cycling through cards at school.
The protection question nobody explains
This is the part almost every comparison article skips.
It's also the one that actually matters if a provider hits financial trouble. Money loaded onto GoHenry, Nimbl or a Revolut <18 balance sits in an e-money account, which is safeguarded under FCA e-money regulations rather than covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. Safeguarding means the provider is legally required to keep customer funds separate from its own operating cash, ring-fenced in a designated account at a regulated bank — but it is not the same as the £85,000 FSCS deposit guarantee that applies to money sitting in a proper current account. Regulators treat the two protections very differently: safeguarding relies on the ring-fenced funds being correctly reconciled at the moment a firm fails, while FSCS compensation is a statutory payout that doesn't depend on an administrator untangling the books first. In practice, for the £20–£100 balances most families keep in a child's pocket-money app, the difference is close to academic. It would matter enormously if you were, for some reason, parking thousands of pounds in one of these accounts, which nobody sensibly does. Worth remembering, too, that the FCA requires every e-money institution to publish its safeguarding arrangements, so a quick check of GoHenry's or Nimbl's terms will tell you exactly which bank actually holds the ring-fenced funds.
Starling Kite is the outlier here, and it's the strongest argument in its favour. Because the Kite card draws on the parent's own Starling personal current account rather than a separate e-money wallet, the money is covered by full FSCS deposit protection up to £85,000 — the same protection as any other UK current account balance. If protection level is your main concern rather than app polish or chore features, Kite wins that argument outright.
Parental controls and spending limits that matter
The controls that genuinely change day-to-day behaviour are narrower than the marketing suggests. Category blocking (stopping spending at gambling sites, off-licences or online gaming stores) is standard across all four and works reliably. Real-time transaction alerts are also universal — you'll know within seconds that your teenager bought a £2.50 hot chocolate at the school café, whether you wanted to know that or not.
Where the apps genuinely diverge is in how granular the limits get:
- GoHenry and Nimbl let you set per-category weekly caps — say, £10 for "entertainment" and £5 for "food" — enforced automatically without a parent having to intervene.
- Revolut <18 offers single overall spending limits rather than category-by-category caps, which is simpler to set up but gives a determined teenager more room to blow the whole allowance on one purchase.
- Starling Kite's controls are the most basic of the four — card freezing, a top-up limit, and transaction notifications — reflecting its status as a bolt-on feature rather than a purpose-built children's product.
For a child under about eleven who still needs the training wheels of category limits and chore-linked payments, GoHenry or Nimbl will do more of the parenting work for you. A sixteen-year-old who already manages a part-time job's wages, on the other hand, is usually better served by a lighter-touch tool that doesn't feel like a toy — which is exactly where Revolut <18 tends to win families over once a child starts secondary school.
Choosing one for back-to-school 2026
Primary school and early secondary (roughly 6–12)
GoHenry remains the strongest all-round choice at this age. The chore-linked payments teach a direct cause-and-effect lesson about earning that a flat weekly allowance doesn't, and the built-in financial literacy content is genuinely aimed at children rather than repurposed adult copy. Families with more than one child under twelve should also weigh the £2.99 family-plan pricing against paying separately for Nimbl accounts per child, which usually tips the maths toward GoHenry once a second sibling is added.
Secondary school and teens (roughly 13–17)
Revolut <18 fits older teenagers better precisely because it doesn't look or feel like a children's product — it's the same interface as their parents' account, which matters to a fifteen-year-old who doesn't want a cartoon-branded card at the till in front of friends. If your teenager is already earning from a Saturday job and you want the deposits to sit somewhere with full FSCS deposit protection rather than a safeguarded e-money balance, Starling Kite is the more defensible option, provided you're already a Starling customer or are willing to become one.
Whichever app you land on, check two things before the card arrives: the actual monthly fee once any free trial ends, and whether the provider is on the FCA's Financial Services Register as an authorised electronic money institution rather than merely an "appointed representative" of one. Both GoHenry and Nimbl are FCA-authorised in their own right; the register entry takes thirty seconds to check and tells you more about who's actually accountable for the money than any amount of app-store reviews.