Run by two parents in the Inner West
AusBabysitters is Matt and Kelly Lewandowski. We live in Sydney’s Inner West with a toddler, a baby, and no family close enough to call on a Saturday night. We built this site because we needed it.
Why this site exists
Finding a babysitter in Sydney meant choosing between apps that charge a subscription before you can send a message, or a Facebook group. We stay off social media, so for us the groups were never on the table.
We paid for two of the apps. On both, we found someone good almost straight away, which sounds like a win until you notice what it means: weeks of membership fees for what turned out to be a handful of messages. The introduction was the easy part. The subscription was the product.
And the need itself was so ordinary. We wanted to have dinner somewhere that isn’t our kitchen. Kelly wanted to take our daughter to her classes without managing a toddler at the same time. None of that should require a recurring charge.
Matt writes software for a living, so we built the version we wanted. Browsing is free. Messages go directly between you and the sitter. ID and WWCC checks cost sitters nothing, because the partners we run them through make free checks possible. And when the site does start charging parents, the fee will be one-off and published before it applies.
Who we are
Kelly Lewandowski
Writes the guides
Kelly looks after our two kids full time. She is the parent this site is designed around: the one arranging the sitter, reading the profiles, and deciding who to message. Most of the guides are hers.
Matt Lewandowski
Builds the site
Matt is a software engineer. He built the site and runs everything behind it, from the suburb pages to the verification checks. He has written one guide so far.
We are the whole company. There is no office, and the ABN at the bottom of this page is ours.
How we run it
Four rules, each written down where you can hold us to it.
Free to browse, free to list
Nothing on the site sits behind a payment today. Later, parents will pay a small one-off fee to message sitters, never a subscription. Sitters stay free permanently.
Our pricing, in fullVerified means we checked
A verified badge means we confirmed a government photo ID with a matching selfie and checked the WWCC with the NSW Office of the Children’s Guardian ourselves. Profiles that haven’t done it say “Not yet verified” instead.
Exactly what we checkWe never touch the money
Families pay sitters directly, and sitters keep 100% of what they earn. There is no commission and no booking fee. We never handle the payment at all.
We keep as little of your data as we can
We never store copies of ID documents, verification details are encrypted, and a public profile shows a first name, last initial, and suburb. The privacy policy only promises what the site actually does.
The privacy policyOne more: every number you see here is a live count from our database. Where a suburb has no sitters yet, the page says so.
Say hello
A question, a problem, or a suburb you think we should add: email hello@ausbabysitters.com and one of us answers it. There is no support desk on the other side, just us.