Why Fenzly costs money, and why that's good news
The last post ended on a question worth asking of any location app, ours included: who’s paying for the servers? Servers, map tiles, SMS codes, developers: none of it is free. Every app has to cover those costs somehow: a subscription, advertising, data partnerships, or a larger business that absorbs them.
We can’t speak for how others answer that question. We can explain our own answer: we chose a business model that does not depend on monetising your data. Location data has a market value, as the cases reported by the press show, and we did not want our revenue to ever depend on it.
So Fenzly costs money. We think that’s not a drawback to apologise for, it’s the receipt that proves who we work for.
We couldn’t sell your data even if we wanted to
Many privacy policies say “we don’t sell your data”, and we have no reason to doubt them. What we wanted is for that sentence not to rest on a policy at all: in Fenzly it is not a promise, it’s a property of the system.
Everything this series has described adds up to exactly that. Your positions travel sealed and expire on delivery. The server is blind to your places, your presence and your circles. Your contacts never leave your phone. There is no readable archive of your life on our side to package and sell, and no way to build one without tearing the whole architecture down. A company, ours included, can change a policy; it can’t quietly change an architecture its app depends on.
But that property cuts the other way too: having renounced the data business, we have to pay the bills somehow. There’s only one honest option left, and it’s the oldest one in the world. We sell the service, to you.
What your subscription actually pays for
Nothing exotic: Swiss servers relaying your sealed envelopes, map tiles, the SMS that verifies your number, the object storage holding your encrypted backups, and the time of the people building the app. A location app runs infrastructure every single day you use it; the subscription is that infrastructure, paid for openly by the people who use it.
And one thing your money explicitly does not buy: privacy tiers. There is no “premium privacy” in Fenzly, no free level where you pay with your data and a paid level where you don’t. Every account gets the same end-to-end encryption, the same blind server, the same protections. The licence covers who’s in your family, not how private you’re allowed to be.
Incentives are the whole story
Why insist on this so much? Because in the long run, a company does what its revenue tells it to do.
Had we financed Fenzly with data, every improvement to your privacy would have cost us revenue, and we would have been arguing against ourselves at each design decision: collect a bit more, keep it a bit longer. Financed by a subscription, Fenzly has exactly one way to keep existing: being worth renewing, year after year, to the person it protects. We wanted our revenue and your privacy to pull in the same direction.
That’s also our answer to “why should I trust you?” Don’t trust our character; look at our incentives. You are the customer. There is no one standing behind you we’d rather please.
The honest caveats
Two, as usual.
Paying is not a magic guarantee. A price tag proves who one revenue stream is, not that it’s the only one. What protects you in Fenzly is the combination: a subscription model and an architecture that leaves nothing worth harvesting. The first aligns our interests; the second removes the temptation entirely.
And yes, a price excludes some people. That is a real cost of our choice, and a free app is the right answer for many families. We prefer the version where you see the price, where a 14-day trial with no card lets you decide, and where a family licence covers the whole household for the cost of a few coffees a month.
That closes the “why” chapter of this series. Next, we’ll wrap the foundations up into something practical: the questions worth asking of any location app, including ours, before you trust it with your family.