Here is the thing that started Orbit. A family safety app sends a push notification when something goes wrong. A push notification lands on a phone that is face-down on a bedside table, on silent, at 3am, next to somebody who will see it at seven.
Everyone in this category knows that. The usual answer is to sell you a call centre: pay enough and a professional agent will look at the alert and, if they judge it serious, dispatch help. That is a real service and it works. It is also expensive, slow to reach the person who actually loves you, and it puts a stranger between your family and the emergency.
We took the other route. Orbit places the call itself, to your people.
When an SOS fires — pressed, or raised by an uncancelled crash countdown, or by a sustained heart-rate breach — three things run in order.
First, every phone in the Nest gets a push carrying live location. That is free, on every plan, and it always will be.
Then, if the plan includes reach, we send a real SMS to every emergency contact simultaneously. Not sequentially — a bad number three down the list must not delay the good one at the bottom. Each message is dispatched and tracked on its own, so one failure cannot swallow the alert.
Then we start calling. A genuine voice call, one number at a time, in the priority order you set.
The detail I am proudest of is the one nobody would ever notice working: voicemail does not count as an answer.
Most automated call systems treat "the call connected" as success. But a call that connects to an answering machine has reached nobody. Your mother's voicemail greeting is not going to drive to the house.
So the chain uses answering-machine detection. If a machine picks up — or if the call is busy, unanswered, or fails — Orbit does not stop. It moves to the next number and rings that one. It keeps walking your list until a human being actually says hello, or the list is exhausted.
And every one of those attempts is written down. Menu › Safety › SOS Call & Text Delivery Status shows you, afterwards, exactly who was texted, who was called, who answered, and who did not. Because the second-worst thing after an emergency is not knowing whether the alarm actually reached anyone.
Almost everything Orbit does costs us roughly nothing per use. A geofence is arithmetic. A push notification is free. That is why the safety floor — SOS, crash detection, the emergency room, Medical ID, the map, unlimited places — is free on every plan forever, and why places have no cap at all.
Telephony is the exception. Every SMS and every minute of every call is a real invoice. So the outbound reach lives entirely on Platinum. That is not packaging strategy; it is the only line item in this product with a hard marginal cost, and I would rather charge honestly for that one thing than pad three tiers with credit monitoring nobody asked for.
It does not call an ambulance. Orbit is not a medical device and does not contact emergency services — it reaches the emergency contacts you chose. In a real emergency you should call your local emergency number first, and then let Orbit bring your family in behind you.
I have thought hard about whether to add professional dispatch. Maybe one day. But the first version of this had to be the version where the phone that rings belongs to somebody who knows your name.