Press

Parents are being sold surveillance: AirTags in school bags, apps that stream a teenager's location all day, and children who respond by leaving the phone at a friend's house. Sotto is the refusal. A child gets five buttons: happy and safe · arrived · on my way home · call me with an excuse · come and get me. Their location is shared at the moment they press one, and at no other moment. There is no background location code in the app at all: nothing to switch on, misconfigure, or quietly leak.

The part families notice: after any check-in, the child's own screen offers “see what they see”: the same map pin, the same delivery status, live. A child who can verify exactly what left their phone is a child who keeps carrying it, and that trust is the whole safety mechanism.

Every safety feature is free, forever, for one child and two guardians. The delivery of a child's check-in is never behind a paywall. A subscription (Sotto Family, £2.49/month or £24.99/year) adds room for bigger families and nothing else.

• What: Sotto, family check-in. One app, two roles: a child's five buttons, a guardian's inbox.
• Platform: iPhone, App Store, United Kingdom. Android planned once iOS has proven itself with real families.
• Price: free (all safety features, one child, two guardians, forever); Sotto Family £2.49/month or £24.99/year for more children and unlimited guardians.
• What it never does: background location, geofences, live tracking, app-usage reporting, advertising, third-party analytics, selling data. Not monitored by humans, and deliberately not an emergency service: the app teaches every child at setup that emergencies are for 999.
• Who: built by the founder of Createful Ltd, a one-person UK company, whose own children were the first field testers. ICO-registered data controller (ZC226255).
• Where: sotto.family. The privacy policy is written to be read, and says the same things this page does.

Sotto is a family check-in app for iPhone, built on one rule: the child presses the button. A single tap tells their family they're fine, they've arrived, or they'd like to be collected, with their location attached at that moment only. There is no tracking, no monitoring, and nothing running in the background, and the child can always see exactly what their family sees. Every safety feature is free for one child and two guardians, forever. Sotto is made in the UK by Createful Ltd.

Download the press kit (zip, 5.7 MB): a one-page fact sheet (PDF), the app icon at 1024px, and five App Store screenshots: the child's five buttons, a come-and-get-me answered, the excuse call, the guardian's inbox, and the child-facing “what gets sent” transparency screen. Use freely in coverage of Sotto; please don't alter the screens' content.

In a hurry? Just the fact sheet (PDF, one page): the story, the five buttons, the never/always list, and the fast facts, ready to forward.

A live demo shows better than any screenshot: the child's phone and the guardian's side by side, including the child's “see what they see” view. Ten minutes on a video call: support [at] sotto.family.