We’re Mike and Lindsey. We have nine kids. We homeschool all of them. Mike’s been building things with computers since he was eight years old — started on a 286 with 2MB of RAM and never stopped. Decades of self-taught engineering, from hardware to full-stack development.
We don’t have investors. We don’t have a team of engineers. What we have is a deep technical background, a family we’d do anything for, and the stubborn belief that we could build something better than what’s out there.
“Your family’s location is nobody’s business — not data brokers’, not advertisers’, and not even ours.”
When you have nine kids, you need to know where they are. That’s not helicopter parenting — that’s just math. They’re at friends’ houses, at the park, riding bikes, walking to the store. You just want to know they got there safe.
So we looked at the big-name tracking apps. The ones everybody uses. Then we saw the prices. The features we actually needed were locked behind premium plans that cost more than a week of bread and milk. When you’re budgeting groceries, that’s not a small number.
But the price wasn’t even the worst part.
We started reading about what these apps actually do with your data. Turns out the biggest names in family tracking were selling families’ location data to data brokers. Every school drop-off. Every doctor’s visit. Every time your kid walked to a friend’s house. Packaged up, sold, and used to build advertising profiles on your children.
We sat there thinking: the app we were going to use to protect our kids was going to exploit them instead. And we’re supposed to pay a premium for that privilege.
No.
We built GuardSafely. Late nights after the kids went to bed. Early mornings before they woke up. Weekends. Every spare hour we could find between homeschool lessons and real life. Lindsey held down the fort — kept nine kids fed, taught, and in one piece — so Mike could sit at a desk and build this thing. She spent a lot of nights staring at the back of his head instead of having a conversation. That’s the part nobody talks about — the sacrifice the whole family makes when you’re building something from nothing.
We had two rules from day one:
It had to be affordable. Not Silicon Valley “affordable.” Actually affordable. For families like ours. $4.99 a month. Less than a drive-thru combo meal. Because no parent should have to choose between groceries and knowing their kid is safe.
It had to be truly private. Not “we value your privacy” while selling your data out the back door. We built end-to-end encryption into the foundation — AES-256-GCM, the same standard banks use. Your family’s location is encrypted on your phone before it ever leaves. Our servers can’t see it. We can’t see it. Nobody can see it except your family. That’s not a marketing line. That’s how the code works.
There are 66 million Americans on government assistance right now. Most of them have children. We’re one of those families.
We know what it’s like to open an app, see the price, and close it. We know what it’s like to want something for your kids that you just can’t swing this month. We know what it’s like to feel like the good stuff is always for somebody else’s family.
That’s why Community Access exists. If your family is on government assistance, you pay what you can afford — even if that’s nothing. All the features. No limits. No paperwork. No proof. It runs on the honor system because we trust you. We’ve been where you are. You wouldn’t ask if you didn’t need it.
Every kid deserves to be safe. That shouldn’t depend on what their parents can afford.
“We care more about protecting kids than protecting dishonest business models. If an app is supposed to keep your family safe, it shouldn’t be selling them out behind the scenes.”
We can’t see your family’s location. We can’t sell it. We built it that way on purpose, and we’ll never change it.
If you can afford it, it’s $4.99. If you can’t, that’s okay. Pay what you can afford, even nothing. Either way, your kids get the same protection.
GuardSafely runs on our phones, tracking our nine kids, every single day. If something breaks, we find out before you do.
We don’t ask for proof of income. We don’t make you upload documents. If you say you need help, that’s enough.
We’re not going to pretend this is just a business. It is a business — it has to be, to keep the servers running. But it started as a family that needed something that didn’t exist and was too stubborn to accept that.
Every family that signs up, every parent who tells us they finally feel like they can breathe a little easier — that’s why Mike stays up until 2am fixing bugs and Lindsey lets him. That’s why this matters.
Your family deserves safety. Your family deserves privacy. And you shouldn’t have to be rich to get either one.