About
Family chat, made carefully.
We're building Shoal because the messaging apps families actually use weren't built for families.
How Shoal started
Shoal is built by Max Whiteford, a father of three with a background in product and software development. It started as a pet project: a chat app so his own children could stay in touch with their broader family. It just got carried away.
Max has also been chair of trustees at his children's nursery, a role that came with a DBS check and safeguarding training. He isn't an online-safety expert and doesn't claim to be: Shoal's guides for parents are built on the published advice of people who are, and cite it.
Why Shoal
The first messaging apps were built for adults talking to adults — work colleagues, friends, partners. Then phones got cheaper, kids got tablets, extended families got geographically scattered, and the same apps got stretched into something they were never designed for.
The result: family group chats that lock you into one ecosystem. Children using apps designed for engagement metrics rather than wellbeing. Privacy theatre instead of privacy. Account creation flows that demand email addresses from five-year-olds.
Shoal is an attempt to do this properly. Built from the start for families. Approved contacts only, so children don't share an inbox with strangers. Devices for kids without identities for kids. Group memberships that match how families actually exist. And — yes — encryption that's real but doesn't preclude the oversight a parent needs.
What we believe
Family conversations are the most important conversations most people have. They deserve infrastructure built for them, not adapted to them.
Privacy you can check, not just a promise
Anyone can write "we respect your privacy" in a marketing page. We'd rather you judge us by what we've built. Messages, photos, voice notes and names are encrypted on your device before they reach us, and we store them only as ciphertext. Someone who stole our database couldn't read them.
We also want to be upfront about the limit of that. Shoal isn't end-to-end encrypted: we hold the keys, because that's how family admins can read children's chats and how we can help you recover an account. What it doesn't mean is that we read your family's messages: no code path exists today — no admin tool, no support screen, no server routine — that decrypts them, so we can't see them in our database. Building one would be possible, because we hold the keys; we haven't, and we'll never pretend the possibility isn't there. The full picture is on our security page and in our privacy policy.
Oversight isn't surveillance
Children need adults in their lives to know what's happening when something goes wrong. That's not the same as surveillance, and it doesn't justify the data harvesting most platforms do under the same banner. Shoal's oversight is bounded, structural, and visible to everyone in the conversation.
Build slow, ship things that last
Shoal isn't trying to scale to a billion users this year. We'd rather have ten thousand families using Shoal and finding it genuinely useful than ten million accounts that sign up and ghost. Every feature you see in the app got there because we thought a family would actually need it.
No ads, ever
Shoal is free while it's in beta. After that, we'll charge a small amount per family. We will never run ads, sell data, or do any of the things that have made the rest of social media miserable.
We're new. Here's how to judge us.
Shoal doesn't have years of reviews, press coverage or a long track record yet, and we won't pretend otherwise. So rather than ask you to take our word for it, here's what you can check for yourself.
- Who we are. SHOAL MESSAGING LTD is on the Companies House register (company no. 17286024), where you can see when it was formed and who runs it.
- That we're registered to hold your data. We're on the ICO's register of fee payers, reference ZC178426.
- What we can and can't see. The security page explains the encryption, including its limit: Shoal holds the keys.
- What we do with your data. The privacy policy sets it out. We don't sell data, show ads or train AI on your messages.
- That you can leave. You can delete your family or your account at any time.
- How it actually works. Shoal is free during the beta, with no card needed. Set it up on your own phone and see what your child would see before you hand them anything.
- Anything else. Ask us at hello@shoal.chat. You'll get a reply from Max.
Where we are
Shoal is a small, independent company, based in the UK. Shoal is in beta and free to use, and the app is improving every week. What we've shipped, and why, is on the changelog.
Get in touch
For general enquiries: hello@shoal.chat.
For privacy questions: privacy@shoal.chat.
For security reports: security@shoal.chat.
By phone: 03330 41 49 49.