What does it cost?
Nothing. Porchlight is free to use: no card, no trial that expires, no paid tier hiding the parts that matter. If that ever changes, it will be announced plainly rather than discovered on a bill.
How is this different from sharing my location?
Location sharing shows people where you are, if they think to look. At 1:47am nobody is looking. A watch inverts it: nobody watches anything, and the alert fires because a deadline passed. Your people are told at exactly the moment there is something to know, and see nothing when there isn't.
What if I'm just running late?
Give yourself more time. On a running watch, one tap adds fifteen, thirty, or sixty minutes to the deadline. If it has already gone overdue, the same tap pushes the deadline out from now and stops the escalation, so anyone who was told simply sees it running again. A safety net that forces a false alarm every time you are slow is one you stop switching on, so this is deliberately the easy path. The one thing it cannot do is run forever: no watch lasts more than 18 hours from when it started, however many times you extend it.
Can somebody put a watch on me without me knowing?
No, and not because we forbid it. There is no way to express it. The function that opens a watch takes no argument for whose watch it is — it can only ever be yours, so there is no setting to leave switched on, no admin screen, and nothing for anyone to talk you into. Someone would have to change the database itself. The people watching are people you named, who then had to accept, and either of you can end it.
What if my phone dies, or I lose signal?
The watch still runs. The deadline lives on our server, not on your phone, and it is checked every minute whether or not your phone is reachable — so a dead battery does not quietly cancel the one thing that was going to raise the alarm. This is the part a location-sharing app cannot do: a map needs your phone alive and reporting, and the moment it goes dark it simply shows your last dot and says nothing.
What if I forget to end one?
Your people get told you are overdue, and you tell them you are fine. That is the system working rather than failing, and it is the trade we chose deliberately — a net that occasionally embarrasses you is worth more than one that stays quiet when it matters. Ending a watch early is one tap and the largest control on the screen, and your own phone nudges you a couple of minutes before the deadline so most of them never get that far.
Does a watch track where I am?
No. A watch is a deadline, not a map. It never asks your phone for your position — there is no screen in Porchlight that sends it. What your people see is what you called the watch, when it was due, and the plate if you chose to send one.
Who can see my watches?
Only the people you invited, and only after they accepted. There is no public directory and no invite-by-search: you exchange ids with people you already talk to, out of band, so nobody can find you inside the app who you didn't tell.
What cities does it work in?
Anywhere. A check-in is a promise between you and your people, not a local service, so there is no coverage area. We are building it from Kansas City, which is why the early-access list starts here.
