ORBII Is Now Free For Everyone

From today, ORBII is free for everyone. Every feature. No trial, no card, nothing held back for a paid tier.

That includes the one thing that was previously paid: verified helpers being dispatched to you during an emergency. It is now available to every user, and you do not need to update the app to get it.

Why we did this

A safety network is not a product you own. It is a product your neighbourhood owns.

One person with ORBII has a phone that can shout for help. A street where thirty people have ORBII has something else entirely: somebody near enough to actually arrive. The distance between those two things is not features, it is density.

Charging for the responder network slowed down the only thing that makes the responder network worth having. We were protecting revenue that, honestly, amounted to about a thousand rupees a year, and paying for it with the thing the whole product depends on.

So we stopped.

What you get, precisely

We would rather be exact than impressive, so here is the list:

• Voice SOS. Say your phrase and an alert goes out, hands free. It runs on your phone, not on our servers, so it works with no internet.
• Your circle. The people who would come for you. They see your live location during an emergency and know who else is on the way.
• Emergency contacts. They get an SMS with your location whether or not they have ORBII installed.
• Verified helpers. Vetted responders near you are alerted and can accept. This was the paid feature. It is not any more.
• Offline paths. A Bluetooth relay through nearby ORBII phones, and an SMS fallback, for when there is no signal at all.

What is still restricted, and why it always will be

Becoming a helper.

If you want to respond to other people’s emergencies, you still apply, submit a government ID, and wait for a person to review it. That has not changed and it is not going to.

That gate has never been about money. It is the question of whether we can responsibly send somebody to a frightened stranger at night. The answer to that question should be slow, human, and occasionally no.

What we are not claiming

ORBII is young. The responder network is real but it is thin, and in most places you will be reached by your own circle long before a verified helper arrives, because there may not be one nearby yet. We would rather you knew that than found it out during an emergency.

We are also not going to tell you that any app makes you safe. What ORBII does is shorten the distance between “something is wrong” and “somebody knows”. That is a real thing and it is not the same as safety.

The one thing we would ask

Open ORBII, go to Circles, and add the people who would actually come for you. Family first.

This is not a growth ask dressed up as advice. An SOS from someone with nobody in their circle reaches nobody. It is genuinely the single highest-value minute you can spend in the app, and it is the reason we made all of this free in the first place.

If ORBII has been useful, tell one person. That is how a street ends up with thirty.

If you paid

Around a dozen people paid for ORBII Plus before today. You bought something that is now free, and that deserves an actual conversation rather than a policy page.

Write to orbiisafety@gmail.com and we will sort it out with you directly.

Will it stay free

We are not going to promise forever, because we do not know what ORBII costs at ten thousand users and we would rather not make a promise we have to quietly walk back.

What we will promise is this: if anything ever changes, we will say so plainly and in advance, and we will not take away something you have come to rely on. A safety app that surprises you is not doing its job.