Blog · July 27, 2026
Yoto players are great. Here's the same idea with music you already pay for
If you have a kid under six there's a decent chance there's a Yoto or a Toniebox in your house, and a small pile of cards or figurines next to it that cost more than you'd like to admit.
I want to say up front that I think these things are genuinely good. Not "good for what they are," actually good. My complaint isn't with the players at all. It's with what happens around age six or seven, and with the math.
What they get right
The magic of a Yoto isn't the hardware. It's that a three-year-old can run it alone. You hand them a card, they put it in, music happens. No screen, no account, no search bar, no scroll, no way to end up somewhere weird. Whatever is in the box of cards is the whole world, and inside that world they have total control.
That's a real design achievement and most software for kids doesn't come close. There's also something to the physical part, kids treat the cards like they own them, they sort them, they have favorites, they lose them under the couch. It's their music in a way a playlist never quite is.
So no argument from me. If you have a preschooler, buy one.
Where it stops working
Two things happen.
The first is the math. The player is $70 to $120 depending on the model, and then cards run about $10 to $15 each. So a dozen albums is another $150ish, and your kid plays four of them. Meanwhile you're already paying $11 to $17 a month for a streaming service with the entire recorded history of music in it. You are, in a real sense, buying the same songs twice, and the second time at a serious markup.
I get why the model exists. Licensing per card, hardware margins, all of it makes sense from their side. It's just an expensive way to hear Frozen.
The second is that kids outgrow it, and they outgrow it faster than you expect. Somewhere around six or seven they start asking for actual artists, by name, the stuff they heard in the car or at a friend's house. There's no card for that. Once a kid wants a specific song from the real world of music, a closed card catalog turns from a feature into a wall, and now you're back to the original problem of handing them a streaming app with a hundred million songs in it.
The idea underneath is worth keeping
Here's the thing though. The reason Yoto works isn't the cards, it's the boundary. A bounded set of music, chosen by the parent, that the kid then controls completely. No algorithm, no search into the void, no surprises. Freedom inside a fence.
That idea doesn't have to end when the kid outgrows plastic cards. It just needs a different container.
That's what I built Songkrate for. You browse the entire Apple Music catalog on your phone and add whatever you approve. Your kids get their own player with their own profiles, and it contains exactly what you put in it, nothing else. Same fence, way bigger yard, no per-album cost. When your kid asks for that song they heard at school, you add it in ten seconds instead of hoping someone printed a card for it.
It also works where the Yoto doesn't. On the iPad, and on the Apple TV in the living room, which turns out to be where a lot of family music actually happens.
So which one
Honestly, both, at different ages.
Under five, screen-free, kid needs to operate it alone: Yoto or Toniebox. Worth every dollar, and I'm not being polite, I mean it.
Five and up, kid is asking for specific music by name, and you already pay for Apple Music: that's where the card model starts costing you real money for a shrinking benefit, and where Songkrate does the same job for less than one card per month.
Songkrate turns the Apple Music you already pay for into a kid-safe music player. You approve every song, your kids get their own player on iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV, and nothing you didn't approve exists in it. $4.99 a month after the free trial. Try it here.
Try it with your own kids
Songkrate turns the Apple Music you already pay for into a player that only has the songs you approved. Free trial, then $4.99/month.
Download on the App Store