No you don't have to purchase the premium package although the free version only allows you to have two places specified. If you need more than that you'll have to upgrade your circle to premium which costs $5.00/month.
This is how I set it up. Hopefully I can explain it
When you register an account with Life360 you provide it with an email address for the account. I chose my indigo gmail account xxxxx.indigo@gmail. I use this account for email triggering anyway so it was already set up. Once you've created a circle (I've got one called Hesketh Family) you can then create places. I created one called Home unsurprisingly. Once that's done anyone you've invited as a member entering or leaving the circle will trigger an email to your registered account. However there is one exception - it won't tell you when you enter or leave the site. I guess they assume that you already know where you are I struggled a bit with this and then I realised I could get emails about my movements as well. I created another user for my wife namexxxx.indigo@gmail.com and created a life360 account for her using this new gmail account. I also set up gmail so that any emails sent to the
namexxxx.indigo@gmail.com were automatically forwarded to my
xxxxx.indigo@gmail.com account.
Ok - so if you've got that far you're ready to set up Life360.
1. First of all I invited all of the family to get a life360 account and download the app to their phones - there's an option on the website to send invites. The only difference was that my wife's account was set up using the special gmail account everyone else just used their normal account
2. I created a circle called Hesketh Family and added a new place called "Home"
3. When everyone had set up their accounts I then went to places and looked for the "Alert" symbol (it's a bell). Clicking on this allowed me to specify who and when I should get trigger emails for. Note that I was missing from the list.
4. I then logged into my wife's account and selected the Hesketh Family circle that I'd invited her to. I clicked on places and selected the "Home" location alerts and was able to select me. I also selected the kids in my case because she likes to keep an eye on where they are
That's it. As people move in and out of the circle an email is sent to my account (because I own the circle) at
xxxxx.indigo@gmail.com. If I move then an email is sent to my wife's account which is automatically sent to my indigo account. All of the emails have the subject [b<name of person> has left (or arrived) at Home][/b]. Using the indigo email triggers I update a number of location variables for the family and can get my home automation to act accordingly.
As for my Nest - Life360 is part of the "Works with Nest" partners so all I had to do was follow the instructions on the Life360 FAQs to set it up. It works perfectly and automatically goes to "Away" the moment we leave the house until one of the circle members enters the Home place.
Hope that helps… let me know if I need to explain it better
Mike