"If you're not paying for the product, you are the product." It's a phrase that's become a shorthand for the surveillance economics of the modern internet. And it's often true — but not always, and not for Preserver.
We want to explain exactly how we're funded, why we chose this model, and what protections it provides to our users.
How free apps usually make money from you
The most common model for "free" apps involves collecting as much data as possible about users — their behaviour, their location history, their contacts, their preferences — and monetising that data through targeted advertising or data brokerage. The app is free because you are the revenue.
This model has a structural conflict with privacy. The more data you collect, the more money you make. The incentive is always to collect more, retain longer, share wider.
What Preserver does instead
Preserver shows small, unobtrusive banner advertisements. These ads are served through standard advertising networks. What the ad network sees is anonymous — basic contextual information like the type of device and general region, not anything about your captures, your identity, or your activity.
Critically: the ad platform never has access to your Preserver data. Your text notes, voice recordings, photos and videos never leave your device unless you actively export or share them. There is no account. There is no server where your captures are stored. There is nothing to sell.
We make money from ads, not from you. The distinction matters.
Why we didn't choose a subscription model
We considered it. Subscriptions are clean and honest — you pay for a service. But subscriptions create a registration requirement, which means we'd need to hold your email address and payment details. We'd have a financial relationship with you that creates records. For an app whose primary purpose is private capture, that felt like the wrong trade-off.
Ad-funding means no registration, no account, no credit card, no relationship between us and you beyond showing you an occasional banner ad.
The small print
We're not claiming ad-funded means zero data. Ad networks do collect some anonymous technical data to serve and measure ads. Our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy explain exactly what's collected and by whom. We've tried to make these documents readable rather than impenetrable.
What we can say clearly: we do not sell your data, we do not share your captures, we do not use your activity to train AI models, and we do not have the ability to access what you record. The structural privacy protection here is that your captures never reach us in the first place.
