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Kantar Lin

AlivePing Check-in - Never worry alone: Safety alerts for missed check-ins

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AlivePing Check-in: A Vancouver-built safety check-in app. Schedule daily check-ins—miss one, and it alerts your trusted contacts, no location tracking needed. Built for solo living, seniors, and families. Free on iOS, Android coming soon. Key features: • Flexible check-ins • Automated alerts • Privacy-first design • 100% Canadian-made Feedback welcome!

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Kantar Lin
Maker
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Hi everyone! 👋 I’m Kantar, a Vancouver local and SFU Computing Science grad. I built AlivePing Check-in because I saw a real need in our community—friends living alone, family members with seniors, all worrying about “what if I can’t check in?” I wanted a simple, privacy-first solution: no unnecessary location tracking, just reliable check-ins and automated alerts if you miss one. It’s 100% built, tested, and launched right here in Vancouver, BC, and is currently available only on the US & Canadian App Stores (iOS only for now, with Android coming based on your feedback). I’d love to hear your thoughts—whether it’s how it fits into your life, bugs, or ideas for improvements! Proud to support Canadian-made tech.
Christian David Bazan

The no-location-tracking angle is a smart choice. Most safety apps default to GPS tracking which creates a bigger privacy problem than it solves. How are you handling the alert delivery when a check-in is missed? Push notifications, SMS, or both? Curious about the reliability tradeoffs there.

Kantar Lin
Maker

@krisba95 
Hey Christian — appreciate the thoughtful question. The “no location tracking” choice was intentional for privacy.

Alert delivery is layered + redundant:

  • Tier 1: we nudge the user to check in via on-device notifications (local + push).

  • Tier 2 / Tier 3: we notify the user’s trusted contacts via SMS, and premium users can also enable automated voice calls (available for Tier 2 and Tier 3).

  • The user also receives an on-device alert; and we send a silent push to wake the app in the background so it can reconcile state and show a visible fallback notification if needed.

Reliability tradeoffs: push is great UX but can be delayed/suppressed by iOS; SMS/voice tends to be more dependable for urgent escalation, but requires stricter compliance (consent/opt‑out/rate limiting).

Curious: for a safety check‑in product, would you expect SMS only, voice+SMS, or push only by default?

Links: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/aliveping-check-in/id6759118161 | https://www.verveai.ca/products/aliveping

Christian David Bazan
@kantar_lin For a safety product I'd want SMS as the default. Push is too unreliable for something where a missed alert actually matters. Voice as an opt-in escalation for premium makes sense, keeps the cost manageable while giving users a real upgrade path. The silent push for background reconciliation is a nice touch, that's a pattern more apps should use.
Kantar Lin
Maker

@krisba95 That’s exactly how I built it! Tier 1 is only push notifications to the user themselves. Only Tier 2 & 3 go to trusted contacts, and those already use SMS by default. Voice calls are just an extra premium add‑on on top of SMS. So SMS is definitely our default for safety alerts. Thanks so much for your thoughtful comment and for checking out AlivePing! I really appreciate you taking the time to share your feedback—it helps a lot.