Family circle: one private home for your whole family's safety

The quiet feature everything else stands on

Every page on this site describes something the circle makes possible. The circle itself is simple: one private group containing your family's people and their devices, with a role for each person and a single dashboard ruling it all. Get it right once — usually during the first five-minute setup — and you'll rarely think about it again. That's the design goal: infrastructure should be boring.

Three properties make it work. It's strictly private: no public profiles, no discovery, no social graph — only people you directly invite exist in your circle, and your circle is invisible to every other family on earth. It's role-based: what someone can see and do follows from who they are, not which gadget they hold. And it's person-centric: rules attach to your child, so a replaced phone inherits everything in minutes instead of restarting your configuration from zero.

The three roles, precisely

• Parents see the full map and every child's settings, manage rules, receive alerts, and decide their own location sharing (we recommend sharing — the two-way map is what makes the whole arrangement feel fair). Two parents have identical, simultaneous powers: no primary account, no asking the other to forward an alert. Separated co-parents can run one circle for the kids while sharing nothing about themselves with each other beyond what each chooses.
• Children appear on the map, see everything that applies to them — their rules, their data, their saved places — and manage nothing that constrains them. The visibility is the point: a child who can read their own configuration argues with the rules, not with mysteries.
• Adult members — grandparents, an adult sibling, the regular sitter — opt in to location sharing on their own device, can pause it at will, and are never subject to any monitoring feature. Architecture, not policy: parental controls cannot be applied to an adult role.

Devices, growth, and the day someone leaves

Devices join the circle through pairing and attach to their person — a child's phone and tablet both follow that child's rules, and the inevitable cracked-screen replacement inherits the full configuration with one pairing code. As children grow, their role's contents evolve (looser profiles, retired features, eventually notification-only modes) until the day a child turns into an adult member — a transition the app handles as a graduation, with monitoring features ending and sharing becoming their choice.

And leaving is honest: an adult who leaves the circle disappears from the map immediately and takes their sharing with them, no exit interview required. A circle people are free to leave is a circle people trust being in.

Free at the core

The circle itself — roles, invites, devices, the live map — is part of the Free plan, because the foundation shouldn't be paywalled. Premium adds the full toolkit on top, one subscription covering every person and device the circle holds, however many that is.