Monetisation#

Model#

Freemium. No ads.

  • Ads were considered and rejected. Targeted ads would collapse the privacy story; untargeted/contextual ads have low CPM and sit awkwardly in a feed that’s already 60-80% commercial messages from senders.
  • One-time purchase rejected — wrong instrument for an audience that subscribes to small monthly things impulsively but doesn’t reach into their wallet for $15.

Free tier#

Everything the app can do at zero marginal cost to the developer:

  • Full feed and rail.
  • Background-refresh-based polling and local notifications.
  • All of the v1 functionality.

Pro tier#

~$1.99/month (currency-equivalent elsewhere).

Pro is framed as “the version of the app that costs the developer money to provide.” This keeps the framing honest and gives Pro a coherent identity over time.

v1 Pro contains only:

  • Reliable real-time push notifications, via the dumb-relay backend (see architecture.md).

Later additions to Pro (as the underlying features are built):

  • Intelligent / richer cards.
  • The “cleanup” rail option (see enhancements.md).
  • Cloud-based AI summaries for older devices where on-device models aren’t viable.
  • Multi-account.

Rationale#

At small scale, $1.99/mo from a small percentage of users covers the dumb-relay infrastructure cost trivially. The free tier costs the developer nothing, so the product can exist indefinitely without monetisation pressure.

Caveat: monetisation does not cover Gmail API verification costs. See gmail-verification-wall.md.

Backward Architecture Enhancements (deferred) Forward