Every feature,
built privacy-first.
Six features most families use daily. End-to-end encrypted where it matters, on-device where we can be, and reliable when it counts — SOS in two seconds, geofences in seconds, not fifteen-minute-delayed.
Live Location
Where everyone is, right now — without the creep factor.
Your circle on a map with emoji avatars, current speed, and distance from you. We use motion-aware GPS sampling, which means we don't poll your location chip every 10 seconds like Life360 does — we wake up when you move and stay quiet when you don't. The practical result is real-time accuracy with a fraction of the battery cost.
Every location you see is end-to-end encrypted between your devices. Our servers pass the ciphertext through without being able to read it. Even in the worst-case scenario — a server breach, a subpoena, an insider — your family's location stays private.
And when you don't want to share at all, one tap makes you invisible. Your circle will see a little ghost icon next to your name. You'll still see everyone else.
- Emoji avatars with speed and distance overlays
- Motion-aware GPS — no wasteful polling when still
- End-to-end encrypted between devices
- Invisibility toggle: one tap, everyone in the circle knows you opted out
- Battery drain under 5% a day in typical use
- No location shown to anyone outside your circle — not us, not third parties
Screenshot placeholder
Safe Zones
Instant arrival and departure alerts. Not fifteen-minutes-late alerts.
Drop a pin on home, school, the office, the gym. NearCircle sends a push to your circle the moment anyone enters or leaves. We've measured latency in the low-seconds range — this is where competitors like GeoZilla and Findmykids are widely reported to fail (alerts 10-15 minutes late, sometimes never).
Safe Zones are configurable per person per zone. Mom can get the 'Lily home from school' alert without pinging everyone else in the circle. You can pick the radius (from 50m pinpoint-accurate to 500m neighborhood-level), the hours (weekdays only? after 3pm only?), and the direction (arrival only, departure only, or both).
Every Safe Zone you create lives on your device and, encrypted, on our servers. When you delete one, it's gone — no 90-day grace period, no 'archived' copy we keep.
- Arrival and departure alerts in seconds, not minutes
- Per-person notification rules
- Configurable radius from 50m to 500m
- Time-of-day and day-of-week windows
- Free: 2 zones. Plus: 20 zones. Family: 50 zones.
- Works offline — events queue and sync when connectivity returns
Screenshot placeholder
SOS Button
Two-second trigger. Your exact location. Everyone in your circle.
In an emergency, a long-press of the SOS button fires a high-priority push notification to every person in your circle with your precise GPS coordinates. Two seconds, unambiguous, with a haptic and audio confirmation so you know it went out even if you can't look at the screen.
If push fails — no signal, airplane mode, dead Wi-Fi — we fall back to SMS. If SMS fails and you're on iPhone 14 or later, you can hand off to Apple's Emergency SOS via Satellite. Your circle members see a hollow red ring around your avatar on the map the moment the SOS fires.
Life360 has documented 'completely non-functional' crash detection — we focused first on getting a manual emergency trigger right because a button that works beats an automatic feature that doesn't. Automatic crash detection is on our roadmap and will ship only when we're confident it's actually reliable.
- 2-second long-press with haptic confirmation
- High-priority push to entire circle with GPS coordinates
- SMS fallback if push fails
- Integrates with iPhone Emergency SOS via Satellite (iPhone 14+)
- Included in Family tier at no extra cost (no "safety upgrade" gate)
- Visible distress state on the map for circle members
Screenshot placeholder
Circles
Permanent for family. Temporary for trips. No other tracker ships both.
A Circle is a private group of people sharing locations with each other — your family, your close friends, your hiking buddies. Circles are isolated: what you share in one doesn't leak to another. You can be in multiple circles simultaneously.
Temporary circles are a first-mover feature — nobody else in the category has them. Create a circle that auto-expires at a time you pick: the weekend of a festival, the duration of a family road trip, the evening of a single event. When it expires, locations stop sharing and the circle is deleted. Perfect for group travel with people you don't want to track forever.
Joining a circle is a QR code scan or a shared link. No account creation is required before joining — invitees sign in with Apple at accept time. Every invite is consent-first: the invited person sees exactly who they'll share with and can decline.
- Permanent circles for family and close friends
- Temporary circles that self-destruct at a time you choose
- QR code and link invites, no pre-registration needed
- Per-circle privacy rules — be visible in one, invisible in another
- Free: 1 circle. Plus: 5. Family: 10.
- Members/circle: 3 / 10 / 20 respectively
Screenshot placeholder
Couples Mode
A shared timeline, just for two. Built for partners, not families.
When it's just you and one other person, a family-tracker UI is overkill. Couples Mode strips away the circle list and shows a focused view: the two of you, your shared timeline, a mood emoji each of you can set, and a live distance counter.
Use it for long-distance relationships — know when they've landed, seen their commute home, get a gentle notification when they arrive at work. Use it for short commutes — watch the ETA count down as they drive home. Mood emoji ('in a meeting', 'heading home', 'having a hard day') bridges the gap between 'where are you' and 'are you okay'.
Couples Mode is a UI skin on top of the regular circle system, so all the same privacy rules apply — end-to-end encryption, invisibility toggle, deletion on demand.
- Two-person focused UI — no circle list clutter
- Shared timeline of arrivals, departures, and travel
- Mood emoji and status messages
- Live distance counter between the two of you
- ETA alerts when one partner arrives at a shared place
- Included in Family tier
Screenshot placeholder
Elderly Care
Designed for aging parents — not kids in a bigger font.
Most family trackers treat 'elderly care' as the teen-tracking UI with bigger text. We built Elderly Care ground-up with aging parents in mind, informed by research on wandering, medication adherence, and caregiver coordination. AngelSense and Jiobit charge $30-50/month for features we include in Family ($9.99/mo).
Wandering detection uses geofences combined with unusual-movement pattern detection to alert caregivers when a loved one with dementia leaves a safe zone. Medication reminders fire at the right time, at the right place — a reminder to take a pill that arrives when Mom is actually at home, not when she's out at a doctor appointment. Fall detection on Apple Watch sends an alert to every caregiver with location.
The caregiver dashboard coordinates multiple adult children taking shifts. See who last checked on Dad, who's responsible today, what his routine looked like yesterday. Routine deviation alerts flag meaningful changes ('Dad didn't go to his usual pharmacy on Tuesday') without burying you in noise.
- Wandering detection for dementia patients
- Medication reminders with location context
- Fall detection via Apple Watch with automatic circle alert
- Routine deviation flags ("unusual behavior" surfaced, not buried)
- Caregiver coordination dashboard for siblings sharing duties
- Simplified UI mode with larger buttons and minimal cognitive load
- Included in Family tier — no separate device or premium fee
Screenshot placeholder
Ready to try it?
Free tier covers most small households. Upgrade any time. Cancel any time.