One year after graduating from the PropelICT accelerator, Melani Flanagan and Matt Pichette are finally ready to present their product to the world.

Flanagan and Pichette are the co-founders of Itavio, a product that helps parents monitor and control how much money their children spend on online games. These games are often advertised as free but with options to buy bonus features. Some kids have been known to rack up thousands of dollars in bills before their parents catch on.

Itavio has developed a product that lets gaming companies effectively market their products to the estimated 148 million teens that play these games and a free app for parents to make sure their children don’t overspend. These components work together to make sure children don’t get carried away and that gaming companies have happy repeat customers.

“It takes a village to fix a problem like this,” Flanagan said after presenting at the Atlantic Venture Forum in Halifax last week, days after the company relaunched its website.

“If you’re a gaming company, you can’t just say, ‘I just spent all this money producing all this content and now I have to turn it off.’ And for the parents and kids, there’s a pattern of spending being formed that’s unpleasant to fix.”

Early in 2014, Flanagan and Pichette took their Moncton company (then called KinderGuardian) through the PropelICT tech accelerator. They did well but had one problem: they had just formed their company and didn’t have a product yet.

So in the last year, the four-member team refined the business, raised $275,000 in funding, spent some time in San Francisco and filed for a provisional patent. Most importantly, it finally finished an initial version of the product for the mobile gaming industry.

They are now beta-testing Itavio with two games that were released by a single studio. They are also asking people to sign up for the product ahead of the full launch at Itavio.com.

Itavio allows parents to set limits for their children’s spending, almost like giving them a digital allowance. Parents can use the app not only to restrict spending but also to monitor how long a child is using the game.

Flanagan says the system helps game makers, who actually pay for the product.

First, they don’t hear from infuriated parents whose kids have racked up a huge bill. That also means there are fewer negative reviews, which have an adverse effect on sales. Second, gaming companies know how much money each customer has to spend so they can market products to the child appropriate to their budget.

Itavio can also reduce a gaming company’s cost of hosting a young client and thereby improve the profitability of each game.

Flanagan and Pichette, who have both worked as game developers, are focusing on the $22-billion mobile gaming market, in which there are 57,000 unique developers worldwide.

 “This is a space we know really well,” said Flanagan. “It pays to play (fair) in it, and we’re going to show people how.”