About
Family chat, made carefully.
We're building Shoal because the messaging apps families actually use weren't built for families.
Why Shoal
The first messaging apps were built for adults talking to adults — work colleagues, friends, partners. Then phones got cheaper, kids got tablets, extended families got geographically scattered, and the same apps got stretched into something they were never designed for.
The result: family group chats that lock you into one ecosystem. Children using apps designed for engagement metrics rather than wellbeing. Privacy theatre instead of privacy. Account creation flows that demand email addresses from five-year-olds.
Shoal is an attempt to do this properly. Built from the start for families. Approved contacts only, so children don't share an inbox with strangers. Devices for kids without identities for kids. Group memberships that match how families actually exist. And — yes — encryption that's real but doesn't preclude the oversight a parent needs.
What we believe
Family conversations are the most important conversations most people have. They deserve infrastructure built for them, not adapted to them.
Privacy is structural, not promised
Anyone can write "we respect your privacy" in a marketing page. We'd rather you judge us by what we've built. Messages are end-to-end encrypted between devices, and almost everything we store on our servers is additionally encrypted at rest under a key our staff don't touch in normal operation. No one with database access — whether a Shoal employee or an attacker who breached it — can read your messages today; the code path to do so doesn't exist.
We want to be upfront about the limit of that claim. It's operationally enforced, not cryptographically enforced against us specifically: we could, in principle, write code to decrypt and disclose, and if we ever did we'd say so clearly. The full picture is in our privacy policy.
Oversight isn't surveillance
Children need adults in their lives to know what's happening when something goes wrong. That's not the same as surveillance, and it doesn't justify the data harvesting most platforms do under the same banner. Shoal's oversight is bounded, structural, and visible to everyone in the conversation.
Build slow, ship things that last
Shoal isn't trying to scale to a billion users this year. We'd rather have ten thousand families using Shoal and finding it genuinely useful than ten million accounts that sign up and ghost. Every feature you see in the app got there because we thought a family would actually need it.
No ads, ever
We charge nothing during preview. Eventually, we'll charge a small amount per family. We will never run ads, sell data, or do any of the things that have made the rest of social media miserable.
Where we are
Shoal is a small team building in the open. We're based in the UK. The app is in preview, free to use, and improving every week. Our roadmap is on the blog and changelog.
Get in touch
For general enquiries: [email protected].
For privacy questions: [email protected].
For security reports: [email protected].