Frequently asked questions

Salvus warns you about three things while you drive: a vehicle moving dangerously fast close to you right now, a stretch of road where fatal crashes have happened before, and a hazard another driver has just reported ahead of you. Each one is spoken or sounded out loud, so you never have to touch your phone.

No. Salvus never shows police, speed cameras or checkpoints, and holds no data about them. It compares how fast vehicles are moving with the speed limit of the road they are on, and it knows where crashes have happened in the past. It is a road-safety warning, not a tool for avoiding enforcement.

Well above the speed limit. Salvus deliberately ignores minor speeding. An alert is reserved for vehicles moving far beyond the limit of the road they are on, and the faster the road, the bigger that margin has to be before Salvus reacts. That keeps warnings rare and meaningful: when Salvus speaks up, something genuinely dangerous is nearby, not someone drifting a few km/h over.

No. Once a session is running you can put the phone away and lock the screen. Salvus says the warning out loud, and it comes through a locked screen and a phone on silent. There is nothing to read or tap.

No. Notifications are optional. During a drive Salvus delivers the warning itself, over its own live connection, and speaks or sounds it out loud. A driver who declined notifications is still found, still warned, and still counted. Allowing them adds the banner on your lock screen, which is what reaches you when the app is not running.

Partly, and that is deliberate. Live alerts about speeding vehicles need at least one other Salvus driver nearby, and so do the hazards drivers report. Crash black-spot warnings do not: those danger zones are bundled inside the app and work on their own from the first drive.

Black-spot warnings do. They run entirely on your device, with no connection needed. Live alerts about nearby speeding vehicles need a data connection, because they are delivered across the network the moment they happen, and so do the hazards other drivers report.

Debris, a crash on the shoulder, a queue that appeared minutes ago — anything a map cannot know. A driver marks it with one tap where they are, when it is safe and legal to do so. Nothing goes live until a second driver marks the same spot, and the zone clears itself within the hour unless people keep reporting it. Seeing them on the map, being warned about them and reporting them are all free, and no report carries who made it.

No. Salvus never warns you about yourself and never reports you to anyone. If you are driving too fast, your device helps warn the drivers around you, anonymously, but you will never get an alert for it.

No one can identify you from an alert. It says only that a vehicle is moving too fast nearby, never who, and never which car. No name, email or plate number is attached to you: on our network you are an anonymous app ID. Of your live position we keep only the latest point, and it is cleared within about 10 minutes of you stopping. If an alert fires, that event is kept for up to 30 days so it can appear on your own map with Pro; the alert itself is deleted after 14 days.

No. Salvus works from first launch with no sign-up, no email and no phone number. You can optionally link an Apple or Google account if you want your data to follow you to a new phone. That is the only reason to.

From inside the app, in Settings. Deleting turns you back into a brand-new anonymous user and permanently erases the data stored against you. The step-by-step instructions are on our account deletion page.

Salvus uses your phone's built-in background location service and sends a small position update every few seconds, but only while a driving session is running. There is no map to render, no video and no screen time. End the session and it stops completely.

Very little. Each update carries a position, a speed and a heading, not photos, video or map tiles, and nothing is sent at all when you are not in a session. Black-spot warnings use no data whatsoever, because the zones already live on your phone.

No, but do not force-close it. Salvus runs in the background with the screen locked and the phone in your pocket. Swiping it away from the app switcher ends the session, and the alerts stop with it.

It ducks it. Salvus lowers whatever you are listening to for the second or two it speaks, then hands it straight back, the same way a navigation app announces a turn. It never pauses your audio and never takes the speakers over for the rest of the drive.

That is a Focus or Do Not Disturb mode swallowing the banner, and it is worth knowing the warning itself is not affected: during a drive Salvus speaks or sounds every warning over its own audio channel, which comes through a locked screen, a phone on silent, and Driving Focus alike. If you heard nothing at all, check the Sound button on the dashboard — it may be set to Off for that kind of warning. For the banner: on iPhone, Driving Focus can switch itself on when the phone connects to your car by Bluetooth or CarPlay. Salvus marks its notifications as time-sensitive so they should come through anyway; if they do not, open Settings › Notifications › Salvus and turn on Time Sensitive Notifications, or add Salvus to the allowed apps for your Driving Focus. On Android, check that Salvus is not blocked by Do Not Disturb and is exempt from battery optimisation.

iPhone and Android, free on both. You will need to allow background location — that is what lets Salvus keep working with the screen off. Notifications are optional: decline them and you are still warned out loud.

Not yet. Salvus is live in Bulgaria today and we open one country at a time as the network grows, so starting a session outside an active country is not possible for now. The built-in crash black-spots come from Bulgarian road-safety records.

Install it, allow location, and press Start before you drive. It takes under a minute. Notifications are optional, and our guide walks through every permission screen on iPhone and Android.

Yes. Free and fully functional, with no ads — including the spoken warnings, the reported hazards and both zone layers on the map. When a country gets busy, free sessions may briefly wait in a short queue so the network stays fast for everyone. An optional Pro subscription skips that queue, lets you tune how often each kind of warning may repeat, shows every alert you've sent and received on your own map, and helps keep Salvus running. It costs €49.99/year or €6.49/month, with the first 7 days free. You never need it to be warned.