What a geofence actually is
A geofence is an invisible circle you draw on the map around a real place. When a Circle member's phone crosses that boundary — in either direction — FamilyTracking sends a notification to whoever asked for one: 'Liam arrived at school, 8:02 AM' or 'Dad left work, 5:41 PM'. The person being tracked sees the same saved places and knows exactly which alerts exist; nothing fires secretly.
The free plan includes two saved places, which covers the classic pair — home and school. Premium removes the limit, so you can fence practice fields, friends' houses, the bus stop, grandparents' homes and the office without rationing.
How alerts fire (and why they're reliable)
Geofences are evaluated on the phone itself using the operating system's native region monitoring, which means they work even when the app hasn't been opened in days and cost almost no battery. When the boundary is crossed, the phone confirms the fix, stamps the time and notifies the Circle members who subscribed to that place.
Each alert is also written to the place's log, so you can scroll a history of arrivals and departures — handy for spotting that the bus has been running ten minutes late all month.
Sizing your zones well
The most common mistake is drawing fences too small. GPS has a natural wobble of 5–15 meters outdoors and more indoors, so a 50-meter circle around a school door can flicker. We default new places to a 150-meter radius and let you adjust from 100 m up to 1 km. Bigger is calmer: a generous circle fires once, cleanly, when someone genuinely arrives.
For large places — a campus, a mall, a hospital — set the radius to cover the whole site so internal wandering doesn't trigger exit alerts. The app previews the circle on the map while you drag, so you can see exactly what counts as 'there'.
Alerts are subscriptions, not surveillance
Every alert is something a specific person chose to receive about a specific place. Mom can subscribe to school arrivals without being pinged every time anyone leaves the house; dad can watch only the late-evening window. Members can see which alerts exist on places that involve them, which keeps the system honest — and keeps teens from feeling ambushed.
Pair place alerts with scheduled alerts for the calmer version of monitoring: instead of being told every arrival, be told only if an expected arrival doesn't happen.
The fences families actually draw
- Home & school. The starter pair: arrival pings at 8 AM and 3:30 PM replace an entire category of family texting.
- The practice shuttle. Know when soccer drop-off and pickup actually happened, even when another parent drove.
- Grandma's house. Adult children get a quiet ping when dad arrives for his Sunday visit — and when he makes it home after.
- The bus stop. A small fence at the stop tells you the morning routine started on time.
- Work. 'Left the office' is the most useful dinner-planning signal ever invented.
Stronger together: pairings worth enabling
No FamilyTracking feature lives alone — this one gets noticeably better next to the right neighbors:
- Scheduled alerts. Geofences power the 'not home by 10' rules — the place defines where, the schedule defines when, and silence becomes good news.
- Arrival & departure notifications. Places are the engine; notifications are the voice. Tune who hears what, per place and per direction, on the notifications page.
- Location history. Every saved place keeps an arrivals log, turning 'has the bus been late all month?' into a thirty-second scroll.
The bottom line
If you adopt exactly one feature beyond the live map, make it this one. Two fences — home and school — eliminate the majority of a family's location texting on day one, cost effectively zero battery, and require no behavior change from anyone: the phones simply announce what you used to ask about. The free plan's two places are deliberately the two that matter most; upgrade when your week genuinely spans more fences than that, not before. Draw the circles generous, subscribe narrowly, and enjoy the silence.