A private channel for the family
Setting this up takes about a minute. The slow part is not the software — it is deciding what to call yourself, because the handle ends up on a poster and cannot be changed afterwards.
What this actually looks like
A group chat gets muted because most of what arrives in it does not matter. A sealed family channel is the opposite: rarely used, and therefore read. A lift home, a hospital visit, a key left under the mat, a grandparent who needs somebody today.
How you would set it up
- Create a private channel and send an invite link to each phone — no account and no phone number needed at the other end.
- Keep it for the things that really do need everybody. That is what keeps it working.
- A family fits inside the free tier. Nothing here needs a plan.
Private means sealed, not merely unlisted
A private channel is not one that is simply missing from a directory. It requires an invite code both to subscribe AND to read anything about it, and a request without one gets exactly the same “not found” as a handle that never existed — because a different answer would let anybody confirm that a school’s or an ops team’s channel exists by guessing its name. Invite codes can carry a use limit and can be revoked; revoking is a timestamp and by default removes nobody who already joined.
Nothing that could identify anybody
Subscribing needs no account, no email address and no phone number. What a subscription actually holds is a random identifier the app generated, a platform, an app version, a language and a time zone — coarse enough that hundreds of millions of people share one. There is no name, no contact detail, no advertising identifier and no location, and there is no export that would let an operator build one. You cannot leak a list you never collected.
Priced per channel, so the quiet one stays free
A school’s internal staff channel and its public parent channel are not the same size and are not charged the same. Each channel carries its own plan and everything lands on one invoice per workspace. The free tier is a real tier rather than a trial: no card, no countdown. Alerts are metered by how many subscribers an alert could reach when you committed to sending it, and going over bills the excess rather than silencing the channel — an alert that fails to leave because of a billing limit is the wrong way for this product to fail.
Questions, answered plainly
Can somebody find my private channel by guessing the name?
No. A sealed channel answers a request without an invite code with exactly the same “not found” that a nonexistent handle gets. There is no response that distinguishes “this exists but you may not see it” from “this does not exist”, because that difference is itself a leak.
What do you collect about somebody who subscribes?
A random identifier the app generated, a push token, the platform, the app version, the language and the time zone. No name, no email address, no phone number, no location, and no advertising identifier. Subscribing needs no account at all.
What happens if we go over the plan?
Extra alerts are billed at the metered rate rather than being refused: an alert that does not go out because of a billing limit is the wrong failure. Going over the subscriber cap is different — new subscriptions are queued, receive nothing, are told so, and are released oldest first when the cap rises.
Do subscribers need an account?
No. They install the app, subscribe to a handle, and that is the whole of it. Only the person running the channel signs up for anything.
Say it once. Every subscribed phone gets it.
Free up to 100 subscribers, no card to start, and the handle is yours permanently.
Start a channel