Finding childcare can take dozens of hours of research that most parents do with a spreadsheet and a prayer. Shortlist does the research for you: we pull licensed providers from state registries, cross-reference inspection records and accreditation data, read provider websites, and organize it into a consistent, comparable format.
The result is a searchable database you can filter by neighborhood, type, age range, and price. No sponsored listings. No paid placements. Just the information you need to narrow your visit list.
Shortlist exists to make childcare transparent — the same data, the same standards, applied equally to every provider.
The story behind Shortlist.
Essay
Everyone said the best daycare in our neighborhood was a Spanish immersion program. We don’t speak Spanish. This is the story of how I stopped chasing the consensus pick and built something instead.
Read the full essayShortlist was built by Diana Clemons. She grew up in Kansas City and lives in Seattle now with her family. When she moved across the country for her husband's job, she built her own spreadsheet to figure out childcare in a city where she knew no one. She thought there had to be a better way — so she built Shortlist to help parents navigate it more easily, applying lessons gained through 15 years of work in data and analytics organizations and stats classes at Chicago Booth.
Every provider on Shortlist is independently researched using licensing records, inspection reports, accreditation data, staff qualifications, and parent feedback. No outside funding, no sponsored content, no provider advertising. The evidence speaks for itself — Shortlist doesn’t rank or grade providers.
Every provider is documented on a consistent framework: licensing status, inspection history, staff qualifications, pricing transparency, and parent feedback. Shortlist doesn’t rank or grade — research shows structural factors don’t reliably predict child outcomes. Instead, Shortlist surfaces the evidence so parents can narrow their visit list. No pay-to-play.
Prices are normalized to a per-day figure (monthly price ÷ days per week ÷ 4.33 weeks) so a part-time co-op and a full-day center can be compared on equal footing. Co-op tuition excludes required parent volunteer hours, which are disclosed separately.
Shortlist pulls licensing and inspection records directly from the state child care search portals in North Carolina (NCDHHS), Missouri (DHSS), and Kansas (KDHE). For Seattle, Chicago, Denver, Austin, and the Bay Area, records are sourced by hand from each state’s public licensing portal — Washington DCYF, Illinois DCFS, Colorado Shines, Texas DFPS, and California DSS — alongside provider websites and published materials. Shortlist also reads provider job postings and Glassdoor reviews to sanity-check pay ranges, staffing claims, and working conditions. When a provider claims their listing through the Shortlist dashboard, the provider-submitted data is added to the public record.