Use the perspective toggle to switch between Prashant (whose location is being looked up) and Nachiketa (the looker). Walk through reason → payment → view → judgment.
step 01
This is your home screen — your circle. The people you've trusted to be able to check in on you. Each row shows their relationship and how often they've looked you up this month.
Switch to Nachiketa above to play the looker side. Then come back to Prashant's side to see the notification and the four-way judgment.
A closed-graph location app where every check-in is deliberate, visible, and consequential. Built around a simple wager: if it costs ₹2,000 to look at where someone is, very few people will look without good reason.
Mutual opt-in only. No discovery, no friend-of-friend, no growth loops. Whoever you let in is whoever can ever check in on you.
Held in escrow. The act becomes deliberate — no accidental clicks, no plausible deniability. The price is the commitment device.
Refund if real concern. Refund with thanks if grateful. Keep it if it felt off — and that judgment is recorded in your shared log.
Find My, Google Maps location sharing, Life360 — they're all built around a binary: I'm sharing, or I'm not. Once on, your location is a tap away, forever. The friction is zero. Which means the affordance is "look whenever, for any reason." Which means the design is, in effect, surveillance with extra steps.
Circle bets the opposite. Sharing is on by default within your circle, but looking is an event. It costs money. It notifies the person looked at. It leaves a record. The act of checking on someone becomes a small, deliberate ritual — and the person whose privacy was touched gets to decide whether the touch was warranted.
None of this is meant to stop emergencies. The premise is that real concern will pay ₹2,000 without thinking. Casual nosiness will not. What's left, mostly, is concern.
This is a thought experiment, not a launching product. There are real questions about Indian payment compliance, abuse vectors, and whether the friction works as intended. The clickable demo is the cheapest way to find out which parts of the idea hold up when someone's actually using it.