For parents
Your teen found Zella.
Here is everything you need
to feel good about it.
What Zella actually is
Zella is an anti-shame daily planner built for the way a teenage brain actually works. Your teen can talk to it instead of typing, connect their Canvas or Blackboard calendar so every assignment lands on its own, then focus on a Daily Big 3 instead of a scary list. It keeps their homework, tests and schedule organized, so you have fewer homework battles and more visibility into what is due. They can even sync it to their phone's own calendar so it shows up next to everything else.
What you can see as a parent
What you see
- Tests and assignments due this week
- Your teen's class schedule
- Upcoming events
What you never see
- Mood scores
- Energy levels
- Symptoms, flow, pain or notes
- Anything your teen doesn't switch on
Ever. By design.
The academic calendar and the weekly health summary are two separate switches your teen controls. They can share one, both or neither, changing their mind anytime.
The privacy, explained
Your teen's detailed health data (their symptoms, flow, pain, notes, mood and energy scores) lives only on their device. It never touches our servers and we cannot see it. Mood and energy are never shared with anyone. The one thing your teen can choose to share is a simple weekly summary: which days had a headache or period, yes or no, nothing more. It is off unless they switch it on, and they stay in control: they can switch it back off whenever they want. This is not a privacy policy promise. It is how the app is technically built. We did not build it this way just for compliance. We built it this way because we believe a teenager's health data should never be something a company can sell, share or lose. Not ours. Not anyone's.
Safety
If your teen writes or says something to Zella that contains language related to suicide or self-harm, Zella pauses and puts the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline directly in front of them. Warm, private and immediate. We do not send automatic alerts to parents, because the research says handing a young person the resource in that moment is what actually helps.
Please read this part carefully: Zella is not a monitoring service and it is not a safety net. It looks for particular words and phrases in what your teen types or says to the app. It cannot read their mood. It will miss things. Plenty of teenagers who are struggling never write it down at all. It is a nudge toward help at one moment, nothing more. It is not a reason to watch your own child any less closely.
Why Zella exists
I asked my daughter what would actually help her start high school.
She's dyslexic and has ADHD. Paper planners don't work when you can't read your own handwriting. She knew what she needed to do. She just couldn't hold it all at once.
So we built something that listens instead of making her type. Something uplifting, not just a to-do list. Something that keeps her health data completely private. Her body, her information. Something that teaches her to break big goals into small steps.
We built it for her. Then we realized how many families needed exactly this.
Welcome to the Zella family.
Rachel Buchanan, Co-Founder of Zella
Mama to Caelan, my greatest teacher. I'm still learning every day.
Zella was co-founded with Caelan Buchanan, 9th grade, the teenager who inspired every feature in this app.