When I started sketching how Orbit would make money, I did what everybody does: I looked at what the incumbents charge for. In most family safety apps, the emergency features are the upsell. Crash detection, dispatch, priority response — top tier. The free plan gets you a dot on a map.
I understand the logic. An emergency is the moment of maximum willingness to pay. It is also the exact moment when a family's ability to pay should be irrelevant.
Orbit has an internal rule we call the safety floor, and it is the one thing not up for negotiation in a pricing discussion. On every plan, including Free, forever:
None of it capped, throttled, or wrapped in an upgrade prompt at the moment you need it. If a card expires and the subscription lapses, the panic button still works.
Depth. Gold opens Health and Driving — thirty-odd vitals, ECG history, trip scoring, route replay, the live cockpit. That is a genuinely bigger product and it takes real work to keep accurate.
Freshness. A map that refreshes every five minutes costs us very little. A map that goes live while somebody is moving costs far more in battery engineering and in writes. Platinum pays for that, and for live heart rate.
Reach. The only part with a hard marginal cost. Real SMS and real voice calls are billed per message and per minute, so the whole escalation chain sits in Platinum.
Charge for what costs us money and for what makes the product deeper. Do not charge for the thing somebody presses when they are frightened.
The other trick I did not want to copy is punishing people for spending less. Drop from Gold to Free and Orbit deletes nothing. Items over the new limit go to sleep — visible, read-only, clearly marked as paused — and wake up untouched the moment you upgrade again. A paused safety item says so loudly rather than switching off quietly, because a safety feature you think is on and is not is worse than one you know is off.
None of this is charity. A free plan that genuinely works is how a family safety app gets the whole family in, and the whole family is the product. But it is also just the right way round.