The 90-day trial
When you create a family, that family gets 90 days free. No card
up front. The clock starts the day you create the family — not
the day you sign up — so you've got room to come back next
weekend and try Shoal properly.
We'll nudge you well before the trial ends. If nobody in the
family has subscribed by day 90, the family enters a 30-day
read-only window: existing messages stay readable, but no new
messages can be sent or received. During that month you can
subscribe to reactivate, transfer the family admin role to
another adult who'd like to subscribe, or export the chat
history. After 30 days, the family and its messages are
permanently deleted.
What "per family" really means
One subscription covers every person in your family — children,
parents, step-parents, grandparents — and all of their devices.
You aren't charged per user. You aren't charged per device. We
don't want you doing arithmetic every time you add Granny to
the chat.
If you belong to more than one family — a divorced household, a
stepfamily group, an extended-family chat — each family has its
own subscription, paid by whoever created it. You don't pay
twice for being in two families.
The plans connect to each other
A child on the Friend plan can chat with a child on the Full
plan, and vice versa, as long as both families' admins approve
the connection. The Friend plan exists specifically so that the
difference between £2.50 and £4 a month isn't the thing
standing between your child and their friend.
Pause if you need to
Families have lulls — a year abroad, a stretch where the kids
are with the other parent, the gap between your eldest growing
out of Shoal and your youngest growing into it. You can pause
your subscription for up to twelve months without losing any
data, and come back when it matters again.
Cancel any time
Monthly subscriptions can be cancelled from inside the app, with
no friction, at any point. Annual subscriptions don't auto-renew
if you turn renewal off in settings. We don't make this hard.
What we'll never do
Show advertising. Sell or share your data with anyone. Train AI
on your family's messages. Run upsells aimed at your children.
Charge you to export your own conversations. Charge extra for
end-to-end encryption. These aren't promotional promises — they
are the reason Shoal exists at all.