One balance. Up to eight people.

The arithmetic, on a real family

Here is a family of four on a ten day trip. Their real usage is uneven, because it always is. One parent navigates and tethers a laptop, the other mostly messages, the teenager watches things, and the younger child uses almost nothing. Between them they will use 28 GB.

Buying separately, nobody can buy 12 GB. They have to buy the ticket above what they think they need, because running out abroad is worse than overpaying, so they buy 35 GB to use 28 GB and the leftover 7 GB is deleted on day thirty. With a shared wallet they buy at the 50 GB tier, draw 28 GB against it, and keep the rest.

Pool draws are priced at the tier of the balance you bought. A 50 GB wallet is $1.36 a GB, so 28 GB of use costs $38.02 against it. The middle column is what the same data costs as one expiring ticket per person at the large travel eSIM sellers, from their public listings on 24 August 2026. Those are their prices, not ours. Our own tiers are on pricing and none of them expire.

How you set one up

1. Open the app, tap Pool, tap Invite. You get a link. Send it however you already talk to these people.
2. They open the link and install their own Passport. On iOS 17.4 and later that is a tap and a confirmation with no QR code and no camera. It takes under a minute.
3. They appear in your Pool list. Set a cap for each person, or leave it off. Nothing else is required and nobody hands over a card.
4. They land somewhere and their phone works, drawing on your balance, at your tier price.

Everybody needs their own eSIM, one each, because a SIM is a phone's identity to a network and identity is the one thing that cannot be shared. What is shared is the money behind all of them, and the money is the part that hurt.

Caps, because you have met a teenager

A shared balance with no limits is a shared balance that somebody empties on the second afternoon. A per person cap is set in GB, either for the trip or for the calendar month, and it does the obvious thing. When a person reaches their cap their data stops and they get a notification with a button that asks you for more.

On your phone that arrives as one line, the name and the amount, with grant buttons for 1 GB, 5 GB, or no cap for the rest of the trip. It is one tap. There is no approval flow, no email, and no waiting on a support queue, because the person asking is usually standing in a station without a map.

A cap never touches Lifeline. Every account on the pool still has its own 100 MB a month of free rescue data in 145 countries, and a capped device keeps it. A cap is there to control cost. It is not there to strand a fourteen year old with a dead phone in a city they do not know.

Kid mode

Kid mode is a device profile rather than a separate product. Turning it on does four things: data on with a default cap of 1 GB a month, Shield tracker and content filtering on, purchases off entirely, and location sharing on. The result is a phone that can find you and cannot spend money.

The child's phone shows a plain notice saying what is switched on, including the location share. We are not going to build a monitoring mode that hides itself from the person being monitored. Every one of the four settings can be turned off individually, so a sixteen year old can have the cap without the filtering, or the filtering without the tracking.

Who this is actually for