This guide is for you, not for your child. The Help Center explains how the buttons work; this explains what the app is for, what it does with what you give it, and how to get the best out of it with a four- to seven-year-old sitting next to you.
What FableShip is, and who decides
FableShip makes short, illustrated fairy tales in which your child is the hero. You choose who the story is about, what kind of adventure it is, who else appears in it and how the pictures look. A model writes the text and draws the illustrations from those choices, and the result is yours to read together.
The account belongs to you. Children are the audience, not the users: there is no child login, no profile a child controls and no way for a child to be contacted through the app. Everything is created from your account, under your eye.
Setting up a child's profile
A profile holds a name, an age, a gender and an avatar. Each one has a job.
The name is what the hero is called. It does not have to be the real one — a nickname works just as well, and many parents prefer it. The age shapes the story: how long it is, how complicated the sentences are, how much happens. The gender is grammar. In Polish, German, French, Italian, Spanish and Russian, verbs and adjectives change form, and a story that gets that wrong reads as though it were about a different child. The avatar is picked from drawings we provide.
We do not ask for a surname, an address, a school, a date of birth or a photograph, and you cannot upload a picture of your child. That is a deliberate limit, not a feature we have not built yet.
Choosing settings that fit
The age you set is the single biggest lever. Set it honestly rather than aspirationally; a story pitched a year too old loses a four-year-old halfway through, and one pitched too young bores a seven-year-old.
Themes have a temperature. Quiet ones — a garden, a friendly animal, a small everyday problem solved — suit the twenty minutes before sleep. Adventures with a journey and a rescue are better earlier in the day for a child who winds up rather than down.
Illustration style is mostly taste, but not entirely: softer, painterly styles read as calmer, and bold cartoon styles read as livelier. It is worth trying two on the same theme to see which your child returns to.
Reading together
The story is the point; the app is only how it got made. Read it aloud. Stop at the pictures and ask what is happening in them. Ask what your child thinks comes next before you turn the page.
Letting your child choose the next theme is where most of the delight lives — the surprise of seeing an idea they said out loud turn into a book with their name in it. And a story that gets asked for again is worth more than a new one; re-reading is how young children learn a narrative, not a sign that you need more stories.
How safety actually works, and where it ends
There are several layers. The instructions we send to the model are written by us and constrain what a story may contain; you never write the prompt directly. Anything you type is checked before it is used. The finished text is checked again before it reaches you, and the illustrations are checked too. A story that fails any of these is not shown to you at all.
Now the honest part. These are automated checks on text a machine wrote. They are strict, and they are why we can offer this for young children at all — but no automated system catches everything, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. Because the checks are cautious, they occasionally refuse something entirely innocent; rephrasing usually fixes it.
The practical safeguard is you. Read a story before your child does if it matters to you; nothing is shown to a child that you have not opened first. If a story is ever wrong for a child, tell us and we will look at it.
Privacy, in plain terms
We store your e-mail address, the child profiles you create, the stories generated for them and the illustrations that go with them. We do not store photographs of your child, and we do not build advertising profiles — the app sets no analytics or marketing cookies at all.
You can ask for your data, and you can ask for it to be deleted; deleting the account removes the profiles, the stories and the illustrations, and cannot be undone. The full account is in our privacy policy, including who to write to and what you are entitled to.
Screen time and healthy use
The thing you are meant to keep from a session here is the story, not the session. Making one takes a couple of minutes of choosing and a couple of minutes of waiting; reading it takes as long as reading a picture book. The app is not designed for a child to sit in front of, and there is nothing in it that rewards staying longer — no streaks, no badges, no feed to scroll.
A reasonable rhythm is one story, read together, and the tablet put down afterwards.
Sharing responsibly
Publishing a story gives it a public web address that anyone with the link can open, and lists it where other visitors can find it. What that page shows is the story: its title, its text and its illustrations — which means the hero's first name, as it appears in the story. It does not show the child profile, your e-mail address or anything about your account.
Decide with that in mind, especially if you used a real first name. You can unpublish at any time and the page stops working; because pages are cached at the edge of the network, allow up to a day for it to disappear everywhere. Stories are private by default and stay private unless you publish them.
Costs and control
Generating a story costs credits. A new account starts with a balance good for several stories. The cost and your remaining balance are on screen before you confirm, every time, and nothing is generated without that confirmation — there is no subscription that renews quietly and no way to spend money by accident. If a generation fails, its credits come back. The commercial terms are in the terms of service.
Getting help
The Help Center answers the practical questions — passwords, credits, missing illustrations. For anything it does not cover, write to us at office@codeenable.com or use the contact form. A real person reads every message.