Finding childcare takes dozens of hours of research that most parents end up doing with a spreadsheet and a prayer. Shortlist does the research instead: it pulls licensed providers from state registries, cross-references inspection records and accreditation data, reads provider websites, and organizes everything into a consistent, comparable format.
The result is a searchable database parents can filter by neighborhood, type, age range, and price. No sponsored listings. No paid placements. Just the information needed to narrow a visit list.
Shortlist exists to make childcare transparent — the same data, the same standards, applied equally to every provider.
Shortlist is built by Diana Clemons, a senior product leader with 15 years in data and analytics, currently at Morningstar. Diana grew up in Kansas City and lives in Seattle with her family; the original spreadsheet that became Shortlist was the one she built for herself when she couldn’t find a transparent way to compare local providers.
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.
Shortlist is published by Shortlist LLC, a Washington limited liability company.
Essay
Everyone said the best daycare in the neighborhood was a Spanish immersion program. Diana’s family doesn’t speak Spanish. This is the story of how she stopped chasing the consensus pick and built Shortlist instead.
Read the full essayEvery provider is documented on a consistent framework: licensing status, inspection history, staff qualifications, pricing transparency, and parent feedback. 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 state child care search portals: 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. Pay ranges are sourced from provider careers pages, Indeed listings, and IRS Form 990s for nonprofits — never from review aggregators. When a provider claims their listing through the Shortlist dashboard, submissions go into a queue for verification before they appear on the public record.