u/EriksonThorsen

I bought Airalo's 15 days 5G unlimited plan to use while I was in Brazil, and I honestly can't think of a worse experience.

Day one was already a mess. I was getting LTE speeds the whole time instead of the 5G I paid for. Day two was even better: half the day with no signal at all. Keep in mind this plan is billed per day, so I lost a full chunk of what I paid for and got nothing back. Their idea of making it right was a 15% discount on my next purchase, capped at a maximum of $5. On a service I'm already paying for and that doesn't work.

After that outage, the signal never really recovered, so I was without service most of the time. I reached out to support, and the first 30 minutes were handled entirely by AI, running me through ridiculous "fixes" like turn your phone off, wait 5 minutes, turn it back on. When the bot couldn't solve anything, I got escalated to a supposed human, who literally started asking me to redo the exact steps the AI had just walked me through.

Then it got worse. The agent asked me for 5 full-screen screenshots of my device settings. Full screen, no cropping. Those screens had a bunch of private information that should stay only with me. I said no. They told me they needed the screenshots to help me. I said no again and offered a few other ways to share what they actually needed to troubleshoot. The agent just vanished. No follow up, nothing.

So I'm still paying for a service that doesn't work and got ghosted by support on top of it. Don't buy from Airalo and don't trust them with this. Go with a more serious competitor that actually delivers and treats customers like people.

Look, $6 is honestly a reasonable price. I'm not here to complain about it being expensive. The problem is something else entirely: the people who truly understand why privacy matters are a small minority. Your average friend, family member, or coworker doesn't think twice about it, and they're definitely not paying $6 for a messaging app when WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal and iMessage exist and cost nothing. So, even if you pay, you end up alone on the island.

And that's the real issue. Messaging apps are only as useful as the people you can reach with them. If none of your contacts are on Threema, the app becomes completely dispensable, no matter how good it is technically.

This isn't even a new problem. WhatsApp went through the exact same thing back in the day. They originally charged $1 upfront to download the app and struggled hard with user growth because of it. Then they switched to a model where the first 12 months were free, followed by $1/year. That small change made a huge difference, people downloaded it freely, got hooked, built their network there, and by the time the bill came, they were already dependent on it. Most people just paid without thinking twice.

I personally feel this pain every time I try to get someone on Threema. I go through the whole pitch about privacy, why it matters, why they should care... and then comes the inevitable question: "Cool, do you know many people using it?" And I have to awkwardly dodge the answer because honestly? I don't know a single person on Threema. I'm essentially begging people to join just so I have some company in what feels like a very quiet, very private ghost town.

So here are a few monetization models I think could actually work better. I'm writing this as a rough draft to get the conversation going, and I'd genuinely love to hear other ideas:

1. Voluntary donation / supporter subscription (~$1.99–$2.99/month)
Keep the app free, but offer a "supporter" tier for users who want to fund the project. Similar to how Mullvad and ProtonMail operate. People who care, pay. Everyone else still gets access. Curious what people here think: would you pay this monthly? And what price feels fair to you?

2. Free download, paid after 12 months
Let users build their network for a full year before asking for anything. By then, they're invested. For privacy-respecting payments, something like Privacy Pass tokens or anonymous vouchers could work without linking your identity to a transaction.

3. One-time purchase + optional premium tier
Keep the current model but add optional paid features, themes, larger file transfers, E2EE cloud backup, for users who want to support the project and get something extra. Think of it like a privacy-respecting version of what WhatsApp Plus is trying to do (even if WhatsApp Plus itself is kind of a mess, the concept of optional cosmetic/feature upgrades isn't a bad one).

4. Double down on business licensing as the main revenue driver
Threema Work already exists, which is great. But the personal app being free or freemium could shift the financial weight onto organizations rather than individuals. And here's the thing: the more recognized the Threema brand becomes among regular users, the more attractive it becomes to businesses and NGOs looking for secure internal communication tools. Brand visibility feeds B2B interest.

5. Lean into the "European privacy alternative" positioning
This one is more of a marketing angle than a business model, but hear me out. Threema is Swiss, open source, and genuinely privacy-first: that's a strong identity in a world where people are increasingly skeptical of US-based tech giants. Positioning Threema more aggressively as the European-built privacy messenger, and potentially offering enterprise solutions to private companies (or even institutions that require secure communications), could open up revenue streams that don't depend on individual users at all.

I'll be honest, I'm not sure if some of this already exists or if it's even something Threema would want to pursue. Just throwing it out there, and I might be off base on parts of it.

My personal preference would be a mix of model 2 with Privacy Pass-style anonymous payments for individuals, and model 4 as the main revenue backbone. That way, Threema stays funded without compromising the thing that makes it worth using in the first place.

Anyway, this is just me thinking out loud. Would love to hear what others think, whether you agree, disagree, or have completely different ideas. How do we help Threema actually grow its user base without gutting its principles?