Personalised visual storiesfor tricky moments, transitions, and big feelings.

Photos are used only to make your story and aren't kept afterwards. They're never sold and never used to train public AI models. The finished story pictures are saved privately in your account until you delete the story. For the full story, see our Your Photos page.

Totally fine, and a lot of parents choose this. Build an avatar instead: choose skin tone, hair, eye colour, glasses and top colour, and add a note for anything else, like a hearing aid, freckles or a school uniform. Lionmain uses it as a character guide whenever your child appears, in Illustrated or Realistic artwork. The pictures follow your choices but won't be an exact likeness. It's still built around your child and the real people and places you name, still follows the same social story structure, and still arrives as both a printable PDF and an auto-playing video. Some families prefer the avatar even when they could upload, because Illustrated artwork can feel softer for sensory-sensitive kids who don't love seeing photos of themselves.

Yes. Every story is delivered as both a printable PDF and a gentle auto-advancing video — so on the days your child would rather watch than read, the same story still lands. It is a silent slideshow with on-screen captions, so you can read along in your own voice. Playback depends on your device and video player.

When your story is ready, you'll get a video download button alongside the printable PDF. It's a calm, auto-advancing slideshow of the same story pages — think of it like a quiet, self-running PowerPoint — with on-screen captions for every page. Save it to your device and open it in a compatible video player. You can try the sample video first to check playback on the device your child uses. It's especially helpful for kids who lean on screens during dysregulation, are pre-readers, find sitting still with a book hard, or are having a low-energy day where watching feels possible but reading doesn't. The videos play silently with captions so you can add your own voice, or let your child watch in a quiet moment.

No. Lionmain is a parenting tool that creates everyday visual stories. We don't diagnose or treat anything, and we always defer to your child's therapy team and medical professionals.

You absolutely can ask ChatGPT to write a social story — but there are three reasons parents come to Lionmain instead. First, privacy: pasting your child's photo into ChatGPT or Gemini means it may be stored and used to train the next public model. Lionmain runs on a private developer pipeline that explicitly bans training on your child's data, so their face never enters a public model. Second, the output: ChatGPT gives you a wall of text you then have to format, illustrate, and turn into something a dysregulated child will actually engage with. Lionmain gives you a finished printable PDF and an auto-playing video, built on standard social story structure, with your child's own face in the story. Third, the cognitive load: there's no prompt engineering, no copy-pasting, no fiddling with image generators at 9pm. You answer a few gentle questions and the story is ready in 3 to 5 minutes — designed by a neurodivergent parent for the way our brains actually work on hard days.

Different children connect with different pictures. Lionmain lets you choose Illustrated or Realistic artwork, and use a photo or build an avatar. Either way, you add your child's name, the people involved and what will happen. You don't have to upload a photo to make it their story. Try the sample pages to see which style feels right.

Free templates are a great starting point, and for some situations they're all you need. The gap is that they're generic: someone else's child, someone else's dentist, someone else's morning. Lionmain builds the story around your routine and your child in a few minutes — the specific appointment, the actual people, the real place — so there's no evening spent adapting a template that almost fits. It's the difference between a map of "a city" and a map of your street.

Never. Your first story is free, and after that you pay per story or per small bundle. Use it when you need it, skip it when you don't.

You can review and change it before you use a credit. The story generates, you read the whole thing, and you can redo any page you're not happy with. The credit is only used when you hit save, and saving is what unlocks the PDF and video downloads. Because the story is delivered straight away and you've already approved it before it saves, credits aren't refunded for change of mind or for not liking a saved result. If something goes wrong technically, email me and I'll sort it, usually by putting a credit back on your account. Nothing here limits your rights under Australian Consumer Law.

Lionmain runs on Google Firebase for accounts and storage, Stripe for payments, and Google AI to generate the story. That means some of your data is stored overseas, including in the United States, which is true of almost every app you use but you deserve to be told rather than reassured. Photos are sent to Google AI to make your story and aren't kept afterwards. Our privacy policy is written against the Australian Privacy Act 1988 and the Australian Privacy Principles, and if you're ever unhappy with how we've handled your information you can take it to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.

Honestly, I don't know for certain. It may be claimable as a low-cost support depending on the plan and how it's managed, and I can't guarantee that. Check with your plan manager or support coordinator before you assume either way. I'd rather tell you I'm not sure than tell you something that turns out to be wrong at claim time.

A few minutes from start to finish, if you don't need to change anything.

Most families use Lionmain for children roughly 3–10, but anyone who benefits from visual previews of new routines can use it.