Why we built a childcare camera platform that signs a BAA
I’m Del, founder of TinyGuard. A few months ago I started building a B2B platform for childcare and elder care facilities. We’re pre-launch, zero paying customers, and I’m writing this from Tigard, Oregon — not from a marketing team.
I want to explain a specific design choice we made that most childcare software companies didn’t: cameras are part of the platform, not a separate vendor.
The two-vendor problem
Run a 50-kid daycare today and your typical stack looks like this:
- A parent-communication app for daily reports, attendance, and check-in
- A camera system for live video that parents can occasionally peek into
- A billing tool for tuition and card/ACH processing
- A compliance / state-reporting tool (often paper) for licensing audits
- A staff scheduling tool for shift management
That’s four or five vendors, four or five logins, four or five sets of credentials your staff is supposed to remember, and zero integration between them. When a parent asks “what happened during the 2:15 pickup-time incident,” the director clicks through one app for the care log, opens a camera app on her phone for the video, and tries to manually correlate the timestamps.
This is the norm. It’s also exhausting.
What we did differently
TinyGuard ships a Raspberry Pi 5 to your facility. You plug it into power and an ethernet cable. It auto-discovers your existing IP cameras via ONVIF — most cameras work, so you don’t have to buy new ones. From the same dashboard where your staff logs daily activities, parents can see live video. From the same dashboard where you record an incident, you attach the video clip directly to the care note.
One platform. One login. One bill. The video, the care log, the billing, the EVV check-in if you’re elder care, the compliance export — all in one box, because they’re all about the same kids and the same staff and the same Tuesday afternoon.
The HIPAA angle nobody talks about
If you handle child health records — allergies, medications, immunizations — and you do, even as a daycare and not a clinic, you’re a HIPAA covered entity. Your software vendor, by law, has to sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) protecting that data.
The big parent-app vendors sign BAAs. Most of the camera companies sign BAAs too. But what nobody mentions is that each vendor’s BAA only protects the data flowing through their system. So if your daily report mentions a child’s medication and that report lives in one vendor’s cloud, but the camera footage of the medication being administered lives in another vendor’s cloud — that’s two separate BAAs, two separate breach-notification surfaces, two separate audit logs to subpoena if something goes wrong.
We sign one BAA. It covers everything. Encryption in transit (TLS 1.2+) and at rest (AES-256). Audit logs retained six years. Breach notification within the window the regulation requires. Database-level tenant isolation enforced by PostgreSQL Row-Level Security — no other facility can read your data, even at the query layer.
That’s a single legal surface. Your attorney reviews one document.
Why I’m telling you this before we have customers
I’m picking the first few customers carefully — not as a marketing slogan, but actual facilities I’ll personally onboard and learn from. Founding Partner pricing is locked for 24 months in exchange for your testimonial and a monthly feedback call. Real discount, real time. The current breakdown lives on our pricing page.
I’m not running ads or paid campaigns. The first customers are going to come from cold emails and word of mouth, and most cold emails get ignored — so I’m writing posts like this in the hope that one or two find their way to a director who’s tired of running five vendors and wants to talk.
If that’s you, my cell is (510) 686-3357 and my email is del@tinyguard.co. I answer my own phone. The product works today — I can show you live video from cameras streaming right now. Book a 15-minute demo and I’ll walk you through it.
If it’s not you, no worries. Thanks for reading this far.
— Del Peck Founder, TinyGuard
TinyGuard puts cameras, care logging, billing, and compliance on one on-site box. Book a 15-minute demo or see the pricing.