These Terms of Service govern your use of FamCircles, the family-coordination app. By creating an account or signing into FamCircles, you agree to these terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the app. These terms work alongside our Privacy Policy — read both.
Welcome
These Terms of Service govern your use of FamCircles, the family-coordination app. By creating an account or signing into FamCircles, you agree to these terms. If you don't agree, please don't use the app.
These terms work alongside our Privacy Policy. Read both. If anything is unclear, email support@famcircles.net and we'll explain.
Eligibility
To create a new family circle as a founding parent, you must be at least 18 years old and the legal guardian of any minors you intend to invite into the circle.
Children under 18 (kids) can have FamCircles accounts only when invited and consented to by a parent in the family circle. Parental consent is captured at the time the kid joins and includes IP-stamped audit metadata as described in the Privacy Policy.
By inviting children into your family circle, you represent and warrant that you are their legal guardian or have the consent of all legal guardians to use FamCircles for their coordination.
Children under 13 are subject to the additional COPPA requirements detailed in our Privacy Policy.
What FamCircles is
FamCircles is a private family coordination tool. It helps families:
- See where each member is on a shared map, on demand (the FamMap tab pulls a fresh location from each family member's phone when you tap it; we don't run a continuous live-tracking stream)
- Plan and dispatch events (drop-offs, pickups, appointments)
- Communicate via family chat, direct messages, group chats, event chats, and cross-family Crew chats
- Maintain a shared to-do list with notes and comments
- Save and reuse named places (home, school, etc.)
- Pull events from your phone's calendar into a single shared view
- Capture events from a photo of a flyer, school calendar, or sports schedule via AI extraction (one event or many at once)
- Coordinate with other families in closed Crews — soccer carpools, friend groups, etc. — with parent-approved kid membership
FamCircles offers a free tier with full base functionality and an optional Pro subscription. Pro features are clearly labeled in the app; details and pricing live at Me → Subscription. Pro is family-level: one parent's payment unlocks Pro for the whole family.
FamCircles is NOT a public social network. There is no friend graph, no public posts, no advertising. The only people who see your content are the members of your specific family circle, plus members of any Crews you've joined.
Your account responsibilities
When you create an account, you agree to:
- Provide accurate information (real name, valid email, etc.)
- Keep your password secure. Don't share it. If you suspect someone has access to your account, change your password immediately and let us know at support@famcircles.net.
- Use the app for the family-coordination purposes it's built for. Don't use it for harassment, spam, or any illegal activity.
- Take responsibility for everything that happens through your account. If you let your kid use your phone with your account signed in, anything they post is on you.
Parents take additional responsibility for kid accounts they create or invite. Parents can view, edit, or delete kid accounts entirely. With that power comes the obligation to use it appropriately.
Acceptable use
Don't use FamCircles to:
- Harass, abuse, threaten, or stalk anyone, including family members. Co-parenting situations are stressful — the app must not become a tool for one parent to surveil or coerce another. If you feel a family member is using FamCircles to harm or control you, leave the family circle (Me → Account) and reach out to a domestic-violence resource if you need it. We will not share your location with someone you've removed from the circle.
- Post or share illegal content (CSAM, threats, copyright violations, etc.).
- Reverse-engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract source code from the app.
- Bypass security measures, exploit bugs for unauthorized access, or attempt to read another family's data. The penetration test we run periodically is monitored — abuse of authentication will be detected.
- Use Crews to coordinate harassment of any other family or kid. Crew membership is monitored for abuse; reported messages are flagged for parent review. Repeated violations lead to Crew dissolution and account termination.
- Use the app for commercial purposes — selling, redistributing, or building derivative products on top of our service — without our written permission.
- Spam other families with mass invitations or impersonate someone else.
Violating these can result in account suspension or termination at our discretion.
Family-circle dynamics
The founding parent of a family circle has elevated abilities (delete the family, transfer ownership, remove members, moderate chat). These abilities exist because someone needs to be the responsible administrator.
If the founding parent leaves or deletes their account, ownership transfers automatically to the next-oldest parent in the circle. If there is no other parent, the family circle is wound down (its data is deleted as part of the cascade).
Members other than the founding parent can leave the circle at any time by deleting their account. Their content (messages, events they own) follows the deletion-cascade rules described in the Privacy Policy.
When a parent removes another member from the circle, that member loses access immediately, but the COPPA consent record (if it was a kid) is retained as a legal audit trail.
Crews
Crews are cross-family closed groups (soccer carpools, friend groups, school project teams) you can create or be invited to. They live separately from your home family circle.
- Any family member (parent or kid) can create or be invited to a Crew. Kids' membership requires parent approval, captured with a COPPA-compliant audit record before the kid joins.
- Inside a Crew, you can chat, plan hangouts (events scoped to the Crew), and optionally share location during active handoffs. The Crew has its own membership, its own chat, its own places — independent from your home family.
- Your home family's data is NOT shared with Crew members. Only what you actively post into the Crew is visible there.
- Crews expire automatically after 90 days of inactivity. The founding parent (or any parent in any member's family) can dissolve a Crew at any time.
- Reported Crew messages are flagged to parents in the reporter's family AND the Crew creator's family. Repeat offenders or CSAM-flagged content lead to immediate Crew termination and account-level review.
Content ownership
You own the content you put into FamCircles — your messages, your photos, your events, your tasks, your places. We don't claim ownership.
By using the app, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide license to host, display, and transmit your content as needed to provide the service to you and your family. This license ends when you delete the content or your account.
We don't claim any rights to use your content for marketing, advertising, training AI models, or any other purpose unrelated to running the service.
Service availability
We provide FamCircles "as is" and "as available." We aim for high uptime but can't guarantee uninterrupted service.
Specific things we don't warrant:
- Location accuracy. The accuracy of GPS depends on your device, signal quality, and Apple/Google's services. FamCircles displays the position your device reports — if your device is wrong, we display the wrong position.
- FamMap pull delivery. FamMap requests are delivered via push notifications (Expo, Apple Push Notification Service, Firebase Cloud Messaging). When a family member's phone is offline, in deep battery-saving mode, or has location services disabled, their pull may not arrive or may produce no fresh fix. We surface "last known" cached locations as a fallback.
- Push delivery. Push notifications depend on Expo, Apple Push Notification Service, and Firebase Cloud Messaging. We send the message; we can't guarantee delivery time or whether it arrives at all.
- Calendar sync. External calendar events (Apple, Google) sync from your device — if your phone's calendar app is out of date, FamCircles will reflect that.
- AI features. Voice event capture and photo flyer/calendar extraction use Google's Gemini API. Extraction quality depends on the source material. Misread fields can be corrected before saving.
- Subscription billing. Pro subscriptions are processed by Stripe. If Stripe experiences an outage or your card is declined, your Pro features may temporarily revert until the issue is resolved.
If a critical feature is broken for you, email support@famcircles.net and we'll prioritize a fix.
Subscription terms
This section applies only if you subscribe to FamCircles Pro.
Pricing. Pro is offered at $3.99 USD per month or $39.99 USD per year (yearly saves about 17%). Prices may change in the future; existing subscribers will be notified at least 30 days before any price increase takes effect.
Family-level access. Pro is purchased by one parent on behalf of the family. All current and future members of that family circle automatically gain Pro access for as long as the subscription is active.
Auto-renewal. Subscriptions auto-renew at the end of each billing period (monthly or yearly) unless you cancel before the renewal date. Cancellations take effect at the end of the current paid period — you keep Pro features through the period you've already paid for.
Cancellation and refunds. You can cancel at any time via Me → Subscription → Manage Billing, which opens Stripe's hosted billing portal. Refunds for partial billing periods are not provided as a default policy. If you believe you were billed in error, email support@famcircles.net and we'll review.
Failed payments. If a payment fails (expired card, insufficient funds, etc.), Stripe will retry automatically over a grace period. During the grace period, Pro features remain active. If the retries fail, your subscription is canceled and Pro features revert.
Future Apple in-app purchase. We may offer Pro through Apple's in-app purchase system in the future. If we do, that subscription is governed by Apple's standard subscription terms; Stripe terms apply to Stripe-purchased subscriptions only.
Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, FamCircles is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages arising from your use of the service.
Our total cumulative liability for any claim related to FamCircles is limited to the amount you've paid us in the past 12 months. For free accounts, that's $0. We say this not because we don't care — we do — but because as a small team running a family-scale service, we can't indemnify against the consequences of GPS being wrong or push not arriving in time.
Don't rely on FamCircles for safety-critical decisions. If a kid is missing, call the police. If you're worried about an elderly family member, call them. FamCircles is a coordination tool, not a safety system.
Nothing in this Limitation of Liability section limits or excludes our liability for fraud, willful misconduct, gross negligence, or any liability that cannot be excluded under the Florida Deceptive and Unfair Trade Practices Act (FDUTPA) or other applicable consumer protection law.
Termination
You can terminate your account at any time by tapping Me → Account → Delete account. The cascade deletes everything we have on you (with the COPPA consent record exception noted in the Privacy Policy).
We can suspend or terminate your account if you violate these terms. We'll typically email you first to give you a chance to resolve the issue. In cases of clear and serious violations (CSAM, sustained harassment, security exploitation), we may terminate immediately without prior notice.
Termination doesn't affect provisions that by their nature should survive — including content licenses you've granted us in messages others received, indemnification, and limitation of liability for actions before termination.
Changes to these terms
We version these terms. The current version is shown at the top of this page (and in-app at Me → Privacy → Terms of Service).
When we make a material change, we'll bump the version and prompt you to re-read and accept on your next app launch. Non-material changes (typo fixes, clarifications) are versioned but don't trigger a re-prompt.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Florida, USA, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute that can't be resolved by talking to us directly will be resolved by binding arbitration in Miami-Dade County, Florida, except for small-claims-court matters and any equitable relief related to intellectual property.
Where a child user is a party to a dispute, this arbitration provision binds only the parent or legal guardian who agreed to these terms on the child's behalf, not the child individually. Courts have varied on whether arbitration is enforceable against minor users, and we don't pretend otherwise.
You may opt out of arbitration by emailing support@famcircles.net within 30 days of accepting these terms (or, if you're re-accepting an updated version, within 30 days of that re-acceptance). Opting out does not affect any other provision of these terms.
If you live in a jurisdiction whose law gives you stronger consumer protection rights than Florida law (the EU under GDPR, the UK under DPA 2018, California under CCPA, etc.), nothing in this section overrides those rights.
Contact
Questions about these terms? Email support@famcircles.net. We aim to respond within 5 business days.
If you need to send us legal notice, the same email address works. We don't maintain a separate registered-agent address for service of process at this scale; if your jurisdiction requires one, email support@famcircles.net and we'll provide the current address on file.