When two people share the daycare run, the handoff is usually a sentence at the door. Daycare Guardian turns it into a shared record. Whoever does the drop-off taps once and picks the location. Everyone else in the family gets a notification with the time and the place. And if nobody taps by the time you were expecting, everyone gets told that too.
Illustration of the two notifications the app sends.
Some mornings it is you. Some mornings it is your partner, or a grandparent, or the nanny. Plans change in the doorway and the last word on it was half a sentence over a coffee cup.
By ten o'clock, nobody has actually confirmed anything. There is no shared record to check, so checking means a phone call that feels a little silly to make.
The absence of a notification is information.
That is the whole idea behind this app. If you were expecting to hear that your child arrived and you heard nothing, that is worth a call. A quiet phone is easy to misread as good news, so Daycare Guardian makes the silence say something out loud.
Three things happen. The third one is the reason the app exists.
Open the app, tap Drop Off, and pick a location from the list your family set up. The time is stamped by the server, not by your phone. Pick Up works the same way, without the location picker, since a child can only be collected from where they were left.
Every other caregiver in the family gets a push notification: which child, which location, the exact time, and who did it. No group text to compose, nothing to remember to mention later. It is already in the day's history.
Each child has an expected drop-off time, the weekdays it applies to, and a grace period. If no drop-off has been logged by the time the grace period runs out, everyone in the family gets a time-sensitive alert that breaks through Focus modes. Not a reminder to the person who was supposed to go. An alert to everyone, so somebody notices and picks up the phone.
This is the complete list. There is not much else to it, on purpose.
Two buttons. Drop Off asks where. Pick Up does not need to. Both are stamped and shared the moment you tap.
A time-sensitive push to every caregiver if nobody logs a drop-off by the expected time plus the grace period.
Every event grouped by date, with who, where and the exact time. Past days that should have had a drop-off and did not are flagged.
Free-text comments on any day, attributed to whoever wrote them. Useful for "she skipped her nap" or "picking up early Thursday".
A six-character join code with no confusable characters. Unlimited members, and everyone gets every notification. The owner can regenerate the code at any time.
Name, relationship, phone and notes, one tap from the home screen. Tap a number to call it.
Optional SMS on top of the push notifications. Off by default, switched on per person, and it needs a phone number. Push works with or without it.
The app never asks for location access, because it never uses it. Your "locations" are just names and addresses your family typed in. Nothing follows anyone around.
Account deletion is in the app under Profile, not buried behind an email request. More than one child is supported, so families do not need separate setups.
A shared log is only worth something if nobody can quietly tidy it up afterwards. Four decisions were made about that, and they are not adjustable.
Never the phone. A database trigger overwrites the timestamp, the caregiver's ID and their name on every entry as it is written. A drop-off cannot be backdated.
There is no update or delete rule on the events table at all. Entries cannot be edited or removed by anyone, including whoever created the family.
Row Level Security on every table scopes everything to family membership. People who did not join with your code cannot read any of it.
No analytics SDK, no advertising SDK, no third-party trackers of any kind. The app is free, with no in-app purchases, no subscription and no ads.
Said plainly: Daycare Guardian is a shared log and a reminder. It is not a safety device and it does not supervise anyone. It depends on phones, on notifications being allowed, and on a working network connection. What it does is make a missing drop-off visible in the morning, rather than something anyone has to think to ask about.
Yes. No in-app purchases, no subscription and no ads. The shipped app has no payment mechanism in it at all — there is nowhere in it to enter a card. Turning on the optional text messages does not change that.
No. There is no GPS, no background location and no location permission request. A "location" in the app is a name and an address that your family typed in. The record says which of your saved places was chosen, and nothing more.
That is the case the app was built for. Once the expected drop-off time and grace period have passed with nothing logged, everyone in the family gets a time-sensitive alert that comes through Focus modes. It fires once per child per day. If you tap late, it is logged with the real server time.
Only the people who joined your family with your code. Every table has Row Level Security scoping data to family membership. There are no analytics or advertising SDKs in the app. If your code ends up somewhere it should not, the owner can regenerate it.
No. They are off by default and switched on per person, and they require a phone number. Push notifications work with or without them, so you can leave SMS off and never think about it.
Daycare Guardian is an iPhone app and needs iOS 17 or later. To join a family, log a drop-off or receive the alerts, a caregiver needs an iPhone. That is the honest answer today.
Yes. There is no limit on how many people join a family. Share the six-character code, they enter it, and from then on they can log drop-offs and they receive every notification the rest of you get.
In the app: Profile, then Delete Account. No email to send, no form to fill in. If something goes wrong, write to support@daycareguardian.app.
