Our story
Tether-safety LLC was founded in Huntsville, Alabama by a security integration veteran who spent a career keeping people safe — and saw a gap no app was filling for everyday social groups.
"I've spent years integrating surveillance and access-control systems for facilities that can't afford to lose track of anyone. At a stadium gameday, watching people lose their friends in a 100,000-person crowd, I realized the same logic — a defined perimeter, a smart alert, a clean exit — belonged in the palm of your hand."— Founder, Tether-safety LLC
The problem we solve
Every major tracking app assumes you want to be watched forever — by your family, your employer, or a permanent circle you had to manually invite. They're designed for always-on surveillance, not a six-hour gameday or a night out with friends you don't see every week.
Native tools like Apple's "Find My" and "Check In" are platform-locked — useless the moment half your group has an Android. And Snap Map, while popular, has no geofence alerts and burns through battery in a crowd.
Tether fills the gap. It's a short-lived, cross-platform, privacy-first safety net for the hours that matter — and nothing more than that.
What we believe
We don't want you living in Tether. We want you to turn it on, put your phone away, and know you're covered.
No one is tracked in Tether without explicitly joining an event. A visible banner tells you every time sharing is live.
We delete your location history automatically because holding it creates risk for you — and we don't need it.
One well-functioning halo alert is worth more than ten half-baked social features. We ship carefully.
Proudly Alabama-built
Tether was designed with the SEC gameday in mind — a 100,000-person event on spotty 5G, with groups moving from the Quad to the stadium to the Strip in a single afternoon. If it works there, it works anywhere.
We're a Huntsville-based company, and our first beta will launch in Huntsville and Birmingham's entertainment districts before we expand. We believe in proving the concept at home first.
The technology
Tether is built on Radar.io's battery-efficient geofencing engine — the same category of geofencing logic used in professional security and fleet management. We pair it with Firebase for real-time group state and Mapbox for branded map visualizations.
The key technical insight is passive tracking: instead of pinging the GPS chip every 30 seconds (which kills batteries and gets apps deleted), Tether uses OS-level "Significant Location Change" triggers and ramps up accuracy only when a member approaches the geofence boundary.
The result is an app that runs quietly for six hours, fires an alert within 120 seconds of a boundary breach, and leaves your battery above 70% at the end of the night.