Built by a daycare family. Literally.
I'm Del. My wife Laura runs Sunshine Day Care, a licensed home-based child care in Tigard, Oregon. The cameras are in our house. The Pi sits in our living room. I'm a software engineer. I expected to help with the website and stay out of the way.
Three months in, Laura was running six tools — billing, parent messaging, attendance on paper, a camera DVR, food logs in a binder, the state's subsidy portal. The day a parent asked to see the footage from earlier that morning and Laura had to come back and say we don't have it, I started writing TinyGuard.
The first version is a Raspberry Pi in our living room running Sunshine's 6 cameras. The reason the price is what it is — $99/month base — isn't a loss leader. It's that the whole stack runs on a Pi plus a few cents of cloud per facility. We don't have to charge $500/month to make the math work.
We have zero paying customers today. I'm looking for 5 founding partners who want the founder's direct phone number and a rate that holds for as long as you stay a founding partner. The price you sign at today is the price you keep for as long as you're with us — because we'd rather have 5 partners who help us build the right thing than 50 customers who churn quietly.
If TinyGuard works for your facility the way it works for ours, you'll save more in the first month than the software costs. If it doesn't, you can cancel anytime — no hard feelings.
— Del, founder