Greenlight is a family finance app built around a debit card for kids and teens. Parents use it to manage allowance, set spending controls, and teach their children about money, while kids get their own version of the app to track chores, save toward goals, and spend with guardrails in place. The service runs on a monthly family subscription starting at $5.99, and every plan covers up to five children.
How Greenlight Works
Both parents and kids download the Greenlight app, but each sees a different experience. The parent side handles funding, spending rules, and oversight. The child side shows balances, chore lists, and savings goals. The basic loop is straightforward: kids check off chores, parents automate allowance payments, and kids spend using a Greenlight debit card that the parent controls remotely.
When a child makes a purchase, the parent gets a real-time notification. Parents can block entire spending categories they consider unsafe, so a 10-year-old’s card might work at a bookstore but not at an online gaming marketplace. Funds in each card account are FDIC-insured up to $250,000, meaning the money is held at a partner bank with standard federal deposit protection.
Plans and Pricing
Greenlight charges a flat monthly fee per family, not per child. The four tiers are:
- Greenlight Core: $5.99 per month. Includes debit cards for up to five kids, parental controls, chore tracking, and a 2% annual savings reward on balances up to $5,000.
- Greenlight Max: $10.98 per month. Adds features like investing tools and bumps the savings reward to 3% annually.
- Greenlight Infinity: $15.98 per month. Increases the savings reward to 5% and includes additional premium features.
- Greenlight Family Shield: $19.98 per month. The top tier earns 6% on savings and allows up to two older adults on the account alongside the five kid slots, making it more of a whole-household plan.
All pricing is per family regardless of how many children you add, which makes the per-child cost drop quickly in larger families. A household with three kids on the Core plan pays about $2 per child per month.
Savings Rewards
Greenlight pays a savings reward on money sitting in a child’s (or older adult’s) general savings account or savings goals. The rate depends on your plan tier, ranging from 2% per year on Core up to 6% per year on Family Shield. The reward applies to an average daily balance of up to $5,000 per family, so any savings beyond that threshold won’t earn the bonus rate.
There are a couple of requirements to qualify. The primary account holder must link a bank account as the funding source rather than a debit card, Venmo, or PayPal. The account also needs to be in good standing, which means monthly fees are current and no wallet or child account carries a negative balance. If those conditions slip, the reward pauses until you fix them.
Spending and Funding Limits
Greenlight sets caps on how much you can load, hold, spend, and transfer. The exact limits can vary depending on your funding source and how it’s been verified. A linked and verified bank account generally allows higher limits than a debit card or digital wallet. Greenlight’s payment processor sets these caps, so they can’t be increased by contacting customer support. For most families using the card for allowance-level spending, the limits are unlikely to be an issue, but it’s worth checking the specifics in the app before making a large transfer.
Parental Controls
The control layer is the core selling point. Beyond blocking spending categories, parents can see every transaction in real time, set per-store or per-category limits, and turn a child’s card on or off instantly from their phone. If a card is lost, you can freeze it in seconds without calling anyone. These controls let parents gradually loosen restrictions as kids get older and demonstrate responsibility, which is the educational angle Greenlight leans into.
Who Greenlight Is Designed For
The typical Greenlight household has children somewhere between elementary school and high school age. Parents who want to move beyond cash allowance and give kids hands-on experience with digital spending are the primary audience. The app replaces the envelope-of-cash approach with something that mirrors how adults actually manage money: app-based balances, savings buckets, and card payments.
For younger kids, it works mainly as a chore-and-allowance tracker with tight parental controls. For teenagers, the investing tools on higher-tier plans introduce concepts like owning fractional shares, with parents approving trades before they go through. The progression from basic spending to saving to investing is designed to scale with a child’s age and financial literacy.