Why "free" usually means you're the product
How the business model behind most free apps really works.
No app maintains itself. Someone pays for the servers, the development time and the store listing it is downloaded from. When the price tag reads $0, that bill does not disappear: it gets paid another way, and that way is almost always you.
The product is not the app
The advertising model behind most free software does not sell software. It sells attention and prediction. An advertiser is not paying to show you an ad; they are paying to show it to someone with a high probability of buying. That probability has to be calculated, and calculating it takes raw material: what you open, when, from where, for how long, and right after what.
So the business does not reward collecting only what is needed. It rewards collecting extra. A data point that is useless today can be joined to another one tomorrow and become worth something. Storing is cheap; deleting earns nobody anything.
What gets collected is not always visible
- Advertising identifiers that keep being the same you across apps from unrelated companies.
- Third-party SDKs embedded in the app, shipping data to firms whose name appears nowhere on the listing.
- Usage telemetry: which screens you open, how long you stay on each one, how often you come back.
- Network metadata and coarse location, which do not need GPS to place you in a neighbourhood.
None of this is illegal, and none of it is entirely hidden: it lives in an eleven-thousand-word privacy policy that nobody reads. That is precisely the point.
The other way to do it
Silentium Supernova charges for its apps. That is an awkward sentence to write on a sales page, but it is the one holding everything else up: if the person using the app pays, nobody else has to; and if nobody else pays, there is no reason to collect anything.
In practice that means four concrete things:
- No accounts. There is no sign-up, so there is no user database that could ever leak.
- No analytics, no telemetry. We do not know which screens you open, and that is not a promise: the code that would send it does not exist.
- No cloud. Your notes, your sessions and your settings live on the device. Uninstall, and they leave with you.
- No ads and no third-party SDKs inside the app.
How to check without trusting us
You do not have to take anyone's word for it. A local firewall, or plain airplane mode, tells you plenty: a local-first app keeps working in full with no network. If something stops working offline and had no business needing a connection, you now know it was talking to someone.
Free is not wrong by definition. Free software, donation-funded projects and community-maintained tools are free and clean. The useful question is never how much it costs, it is who pays for it. When that answer appears nowhere on the page, it is usually because the answer is you.