UPDATESep 13, 2026building india

Parisar: a society platform that serves the people who live there

India's society apps are paid for with residents' attention and data. Parisar is paid for by the society — a transparent per-home fee that is the entire business — and built around the gate, the household, the people who work there, and the committee's books. Deployed and piloting; not yet on the app stores.

Why it exists

You do not choose your society's app. The committee does, and then everyone who lives there is on it — which makes residents a captive audience. Most of the apps in this market are built for exactly that: free to the society, and paid for with the residents' attention, data and doorstep.

Parisar is benchmarked against the best community platforms in the world rather than against that model. The society pays a transparent subscription, and that fee is the entire business. No ads, ever, and nothing done with resident data.

Four commitments, enforced in code

Quiet by design. Notifications have ceilings and quiet hours. Deciding what is allowed to interrupt a resident came before deciding what to send.
Tenants are residents. A landlord cannot see the visitors to a flat they have rented out.
Dignity for the people who work there. No biometrics, no public ratings, no movement tracking — and a domestic worker's registration needs their consent.
An accountable gate. Restricting someone's entry needs a policy, evidence, notice and a route to appeal.

What it does

The gate. A guard logs a visitor on a tablet and the resident approves on their phone. If nobody answers, a four-step escalation takes over. Passes are cryptographically signed, so a guard's tablet can verify one with no network at all, and gate events queue offline until the connection returns.
The household. Members and the order the gate asks them in, away mode, standing rules, an SOS with a real siren, and every signed-in device visible and revocable.
Daily help. Registration the worker consents to, and attendance recorded at the gate.
Around the home. Pets, vehicles, the directory, emergency numbers, and paying dues.
For the committee. A web console with a double-entry ledger and maker–checker approval on money, arrears, a helpdesk, notices, rosters, and an import wizard to bring a society on board.

Underneath: each society's data is separated in three layers, with row-level security in the database as the last line; the audit log is hash-chained so it cannot be quietly edited; and every personal field carries its own privacy and retention rule.

Pricing

A six-week pilot is free. After that it is ₹30 a home a month, or ₹24 for large estates, billed annually to the society. Residents are never charged.

Where it stands — September 2026

Deployed. The backend and the website at parisar.app are live; the committee console and finance went live on 12 September.
The core loop is proven on real devices: a guard logs a guest on a tablet, a resident approves on a phone, and the record lands where it should.
Android is built and tested on real phones against production, with its store listing in preparation. iOS has not been started.
A pilot society is onboarding. There are no paying societies yet.

What has been hard

The failure that kept recurring was code that was built, tested and never called. Live updates had both ends written and nothing that sent them. A safeguard existed, passed its tests, and sat unused by the one path that needed it. Several tests turned out to pass for the wrong reason, so they are now checked by deliberately breaking the code and confirming the test notices.

The other hard part is restraint. Every feature makes a good case for one more notification, and a society app that pings people all day is exactly the thing Parisar exists not to be.