Saved places: teach the map your family's life once

From coordinates to vocabulary

A raw location app speaks in pins and street names. Saved places teach it to speak in your family's vocabulary instead. Once you've named the places that structure your week — home, both schools, the pitch, the piano teacher, Nana's, the Hendersons' — everything built on top changes register: alerts read arrived at school rather than an address, history reads school → library → home like a sentence, and a glance at the map answers questions in the same words you'd ask them.

It's a ten-minute, one-time investment — and it's quietly the difference between a tool the whole family reads fluently and a dashboard only the most motivated parent ever opens.

What a saved place gives you

• A name and an icon the whole circle sees — on the map, in alerts, in history. Kids name their own additions with relish; let them.
• Smart alerts, per place, per child: arrivals only for school (the departure is implied by the arrival home), both directions for the after-school job, departure-only for the friend's house that means the walk home has started. Each place remembers its own rules.
• Per-parent muting: one parent takes school alerts, the other takes practice — the circle covers everything without both phones buzzing twice.
• Scheduled relevance: a school-arrival alert matters at 8 am on a Tuesday and is noise on a Saturday. Alerts can respect the rhythm of the place.
• Cleaner everything downstream: named places make reports readable and turn the day's timeline into a story instead of a coordinate list.

The setup worth doing well

Most families save home and school in minute one and stop. The full value arrives with the second tier — the eight or ten places that make up the actual texture of the week. A practical way to find them: scroll one week of location history with your child and name every stop that appears twice. (This is also, not incidentally, a lovely conversation — the map of a child's week is the child's world, and being asked "what should we call this place?" is being asked about your life.)

• Size honestly: a generous 150–250 m radius beats a tight circle that misfires — full sizing guidance lives on the geofencing page.
• Prune seasonally: the swim-lesson pool matters until the course ends. A five-minute review each school term keeps the alert stream meaningful — the enemy of a good alert system is alerts nobody reads.
• Let teens propose places: "alert when I leave work and I'll skip the 'heading home' text" is a teen using the system on their own behalf — the exact endpoint you're parenting toward.

Free to start, unlimited with Premium

Two saved places with full alerts are free forever. Premium removes the cap and adds the scheduling and per-place intelligence above — the difference between knowing about home and school, and the map speaking your family's whole language.