Biscayne Park, Florida
Software for families, built carefully
Thomas Collective is a small software company. It builds tools for the ordinary logistics of family life — the ones that run on group texts today and deserve better — and it builds them slowly enough to get the safety parts right.
What we are working on
Pickup Circle
A parent already driving to a school or activity pickup says so, and other parents in the same invite-only circle can ask them to bring their child too. The spare seats are in a trip that was happening anyway. There are no fares between parents, no drivers for hire, and nobody outside a circle can see that it exists.
In a closed pilot with families in Miami-Dade County, Florida.
How we build
The safety promises are structural, not settings
A child's details are encrypted before they reach the database, and the database has no column for a home address — not a blank one, none at all. Notifications carry what a driver needs and never a child's name. These are properties of the schema and of automated checks that refuse to let a change through, rather than a preference a future release could quietly drop.
Small first, and honest about the stage
Pickup Circle runs with a handful of families who already know each other, and it says so wherever anyone might assume otherwise. Drivers are other parents, not vetted staff, and the app tells a parent that the first time they ask for a ride rather than burying it in terms.
No advertising, no trackers, no selling anyone's data
There is no analytics tracker in the product and no advertising business behind it. The list of companies that touch any family's data is short, named in the privacy notice, and there for a reason a parent can check.
The company
Thomas Collective, LLC is a limited liability company registered in the State of Florida, based in Biscayne Park. It is run by Lance Thomas, who writes the software, answers the support address, and is a parent in the pilot.
Contact
Anything about Pickup Circle, including a family's own data, a correction or a deletion request, goes to support@pickupcircle.app, and a person answers. Company enquiries go to hello@thomascollective.org.
Schools, activity providers and parent groups who want to know how a circle works before their families use one are welcome to write; we would rather explain it than have anyone guess.