“Free” in this category usually means one of three things: a trial, a crippled tier, or your family’s movements sold on to somebody you have never heard of. Here is exactly which parts of TribeSentry are free, which are not, and how we pay for it.
TribeSentry+ is the optional upgrade. It adds the full 7-day location history with route playback, unlimited territories, offline map downloads for areas with no reception, and it removes ads. On the free tier the history window is the last 2 hours.
That split is deliberate, and it is the only one we think is defensible: storing history is the part that genuinely costs us money per user per month, so that is the part we charge for. Nothing that matters in an emergency is behind the paywall.
Ads, and people who upgrade. That is the whole list. We do not sell location data, we have never sold location data, and there is no arrangement under which anybody buys it from us. Location history is deleted automatically after 7 days, which also means there is very little to sell even if we changed our minds.
If an app is free and the company has no subscription worth speaking of, it is worth asking what is being sold instead. That question is the reason this app exists.
A parent approves every single person who joins a tribe. Until then they see nothing at all — not the map, not the member list, not one location. Everyone chooses when to share and can stop at any moment, and the family is told sharing is off rather than being shown a stale pin that looks live. You can delete your account, and everything attached to it, from inside the app.
iPhone · 11 languages · SOS and crash detection are free
Crash detection is based on phone sensors. It can miss a real crash and it can raise a false alarm; it is not a substitute for emergency services. Continued use of GPS running in the background can decrease battery life.