The limits are the product.
Most of this category sells you a promise it can’t keep. We’d rather you knew precisely what you’re getting before you rely on it, because the moment you rely on it wrongly is the moment it hurts you.
Not a rescue service.
We do not contact search and rescue, and we have no relationship with any agency. Nobody at Porchlight is watching a screen — there is no operations centre, and there is no one on call.
Agencies don’t accept automated reports from consumer apps, and they’re right not to: every false dispatch costs money and puts volunteers in the field for nothing. So we tell the people you chose, and a human who knows you decides whether to make the call.
Not a tracker.
We take your location three times: when you file, when you start, and when you choose to send an update. There are no breadcrumbs, no background pings, no live map, and nothing for anyone to watch.
This is a deliberate limit, not a missing feature. Continuous tracking would drain the battery you may need, and it would turn a note left for a friend into surveillance by the people who care about you.
Not a public register.
Nobody browses trips. There is no feed, no directory, no map of who’s out. Your plan is visible to you and to the people you named — and to nobody else, at any price, including us in aggregate.
A trailhead logbook tells every stranger who reads it that you’re alone and when you’ll be back. We are the opposite of that by design.
Not a substitute for a beacon.
Porchlight cannot call for help from the backcountry. It runs on a phone, and phones need signal. If you need to summon help from where there are no bars, carry a satellite messenger — they cost more than we do and they do a different job.
What we do is notice when you don’t come back. A beacon needs you conscious and able to press it. We work when you can’t.
No streaks, no badges, no trips-survived counter, no celebration when you get home. The best week in Porchlight is a completely silent one. If you find yourself opening the app for any reason other than filing or closing out, we’ve built it wrong.
Call 911. Not us. We are a timer and a list of phone numbers, and on the worst day of your life that is worth exactly as much as the people on the list — which, if you chose them well, is quite a lot.