Why we built Koru Shield

It started as a personal project

I'm Summit Singh Thakur, based in Austin, Texas, and Koru Shield wasn't originally conceived as a company. It started as an internal project I was building for my own use, under the working name SummitDNS. The goal was simple: I wanted a DNS filter I could point my own devices at, one that blocked the obvious junk, phishing attempts, malware domains, intrusive trackers, without me having to babysit it or re-learn its configuration every few months.

What kept pulling me back into the project was realizing, again and again, that the tools already out there all made the same tradeoff, just in opposite directions. Some were built for people who already understood DNS deeply. Others were built for people who wanted something that just worked, at the cost of giving up almost all control. There wasn't much in between, and the people who needed something in between were exactly the people least likely to go looking for it.

The technical tools ask too much

Tools like NextDNS and Pi-hole are genuinely good at what they do, and plenty of technically-minded people use them happily. But they're built with the assumption that the person setting them up already understands DNS resolution, blocklist syntax, and how to debug a configuration when something breaks. Pi-hole in particular expects you to run your own server, keep it updated, and troubleshoot it when your home network changes. NextDNS is more approachable but still surfaces a lot of raw configuration: blocklist selection, logging settings, per-device profiles that need to be understood before they're useful.

For someone comfortable in that world, this is a feature, not a problem. But most families aren't looking for a project. They're looking for something that protects everyone in the house without becoming a part-time responsibility for whoever set it up. When a parent has to understand resolver syntax to keep their kids' devices protected, the tool has already lost most of its intended audience.

The locked-down tools ask too little, and give up too much control

On the other end, tools like Circle or the parental-control features baked into router firmware solve the ease-of-use problem, but often by removing almost all flexibility. They tend to be built around a single household administrator controlling everything, with limited ability for anyone else in the house to understand or adjust what's being blocked. Settings can be opaque, categories can be broad and blunt, and the underlying filtering logic is usually proprietary and hard to inspect.

That model works for some households. But it treats protection and control as a tradeoff you have to accept, rather than two things you should be able to have at once. A family should be able to get strong, always-on protection without needing a computer science degree, and without having to trust a black box they can't see into or adjust when it gets something wrong.

Koru Shield is the middle we were missing

The name Koru comes from the Māori word for the unfurling fern frond, a symbol of new growth and gentle, continuous unfolding, which felt like the right image for a protection tool: not a wall, not a lockdown, just something that quietly keeps unfolding protection around you as you go. That's the core idea behind the product. Setup takes about a minute per device, using the same guided flow regardless of technical background. The filtering runs over encrypted DNS, so it's private by default, not as an advanced option buried in a settings menu. And the controls that matter, like the family content filter, are visible and understandable rather than hidden behind jargon.

We also made a deliberate choice around honesty in how blocking works. When something is blocked, you see a clear page explaining what was stopped and why, with a straightforward way to allow it if you decide you want to. That stands in contrast to tools that block silently or make it hard to understand what's actually being filtered and on what basis.

What this means for pricing and growth

Because this started as a project to solve my own problem, the free plan isn't a stripped-down trial designed to push people toward upgrading. It's the same core protection, meant to be genuinely useful on its own: blocking malware, phishing, ads, and trackers, with the family content filter available to everyone. The paid tiers exist for people who want more, like smarter scam detection or household screen-time tools, not because the free tier was deliberately left incomplete.

Koru Shield is still early. Some features described on this site are live today, and some are clearly marked as on the roadmap rather than available now, because we'd rather be straightforward about what the product does right now than oversell what's coming. The goal from here is the same as it was when this was just a personal project: build the DNS filter that a family can actually set up, actually understand, and actually trust, without asking them to become network administrators to get there.