WeeCare, Carebnb’s, and the US Child Care Epidemic

US child care is a $57 billion market (60% in-home, 40% in-center). An additional $22 billion is spent via government subsidies, and the amount of time spent and forgone wages by parents and family members providing unpaid care is orders of magnitude larger than the actual dollars spent.

Experts estimate there’s a 3:1 ratio of kids needing care to kids in care. The highest quality options often have waitlists of a year or more. This lack of supply primarily impacts women, and specifically those with low incomes, single parents, and people of color.

WeeCare’s Fever Free product launched in July represents another addition to its product stack. It’s the internal tool it used to detect family fevers from their homes pre-drop off, leading to zero COVID spread in any of its 2,700 locations.

WeeCare educators earn an income 2-3x higher than if they were working in a senior role at a large child care center - up to $100,000 per year, or 4x the national average. They can leverage their personal mortgage / rent payments for business use, and those with young families can spend the day around their own children while earning income teachin... See more

WeeCare’s home market of Los Angeles is a perfect case study of its model. It currently has over 900 schools in the Greater LA area, or approximately 18% of all in-home daycares in Los Angeles County.

Another way to frame WeeCare’s growth: Before WeeCare’s 2018 launch, Bright Horizons had a total of 695 US centers (page 21). By October of 2020, WeeCare had 2,700 US schools compared to a net of 13 additional centers brought online by Bright Horizons.

WeeCare's in-home model often results in tuition prices 30-40% below market.

It’s essentially an in-home daycare “business in a box”. Customized software saves time for a child care professional spending an average of 56.5 hours per week watching children and reduces churn for WeeCare as they acquire clients for their customers.

Employers paying for child care could expand the size of the market significantly as more unpaid, family, and friend-based care shifts to a professional setting. And WeeCare offers a solution to quickly spin-up the exact supply needed to support others in the child care benefits like Kinside, Winnie, and Care.com.

It’s estimated families without access to affordable care forgo $29 billion in wages annually.