Is Honeycomb right for you?
Honeycomb is more than messaging: it makes it easier to figure out who that parent is at pick up, coordinate a carpool, figure out after school activities, and remember which kid has that serious allergy. By combining messaging with family accounts and a shared group calendar, Honeycomb helps parents manage parenting logistics faster, together. Bonus: no more random numbers in your group chat!
👩🏾👩 Honeycomb’s family profiles help you put faces to names, while our family accounts help share communication within families (all users with account access see all messages), so no more guessing who the primary parent is, leaving dads out of the loop, or putting the mental load on mom’s plate.
🧵 Honeycomb’s topic-based messaging is purpose-built for parents, helping keep your many, many different parenting and logistics threads organized. No more overwhelming mega chat threads full of buried to dos (where was that soccer sign-up link again?)
📅 Honeycomb's shared group calendar and simple events tool means no more digging through the school website for that pdf calendar, and easier, less noisy coordination around events and deadlines.
🙌🏽 And Honeycomb is just getting started. On our roadmap: after-school activity coordination, carpooling, and other simple tools designed to reduce the volume of messaging, while increasing parent-to-parent support.
As parents who survived remote schooling and are trying to spend less time on our phones, we get push back on new technology! Are you also getting an ever-increasing number of emails and notifications from tools (think: sports team apps) which –– because they aren’t built for parents –– just spawn more noisy group text messaging (think: sports team carpools)?
We believe parents deserve better.
We especially believe room parents, parent coaches, and all the moms and dads who try to share the load and team up –– we see you, dance class organizers and summer camp spreadsheet makers! –– deserve a tool built especially for them. Community-building takes a lot of unpaid labor; it’s also fundamental to our health, and the well-being of our children. Given its importance, why not invest your valuable digital attention into tech specifically designed to make communities stronger?
Privacy and security are extremely important to us since Honeycomb handles family data.
Honeycomb is an invite-only app made up of small, private groups. Any content created by a user is private to their communities:
This is unlike large messaging platforms like WhatsApp which are essentially public systems where anyone can message you, groups can be incredibly large, messages and photos can be easily forwarded outside groups they were intended for, and more.
Honeycomb also has built privacy controls into the app. For certain pieces of data –– like phone, email, address –– users get to choose whether they're made visible to others in their community. We're continuing to evolve and add to these controls.
We ask for Contacts and Photo permissions in-app to simplify the user experience (e.g. to help you select which photo to post, or to be able to invite a contact by name). The only data we store on our servers is data that a user explicitly chooses or creates in the app — we don’t store your address book and we don’t upload any photos you haven’t explicitly selected as a profile photo or shared in a post.
Honeycomb user data is encrypted both in transit and where it's stored, which means a bad actor cannot see your posts in transit and a hacker breaking into AWS (Amazon) cannot access your photos. All Honeycomb data lives in data centers within the US and nothing is stored offshore.
“End-to-end” encryption (built into mass market messaging apps like WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal, etc.) is an additional layer of security that ensures government officials with a court order or hackers who’ve stolen encryption keys cannot access the contents of your posts or photos. This makes a lot of sense for people like journalists who need to protect sources, activists afraid of being persecuted or someone transmitting highly sensitive/confidential data. “End-to-end” encryption itself, however, doesn’t protect “metadata” — who your friends are, what your contact info is, how often you’ve messaged someone — and we’ve taken measures to ensure that data remains safe as well.
“End-to-end” encryption is on our roadmap but we’re prioritizing security and privacy features that are most relevant to our parent audience.
Yes! In the future, a Honeycomb parent may have the option to opt-in to a premium version of Honeycomb that offers special features that help them save time, like a carpool coordination tool. This will be optional and won’t impact a parents’ ability to use all of Honeycomb’s existing features (group chat, directory, event and playdate scheduling, etc.)
Please find our community guidelines here. We share these guidelines with all users when they first join.
Our accounts represent families –– not individuals –– which helps anchor our users in their role as parents and community members. Our focus on in-real-life community and emphasis on getting together in person to have complex conversations also helps prevent the anxiety and divisive behavior that shows up in social media and larger communities.
Everyone on Honeycomb is a real person, part of a family and a larger community (classroom, school or activity group), and their content is limited to the Honeycomb platform. This helps keep the conversation grounded.
Absolutely! Email hello@honeycomb-labs.com with the name of your school and location, and your role there, and a member of our team will happily be in touch.