How we make money without selling your data

There is an old, mostly true rule about free software: if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. It holds up often enough that it is a reasonable thing to ask about any app that claims to be both private and free — including this one. So here is a direct answer instead of a vague reassurance.

The actual business model

Prevon's Free tier is a complete, real product: full zero-knowledge encryption, the on-device AI Brain, unlimited local notes, direct device-to-device pairing. None of it is a stripped-down trial designed to push you toward paying. It works fully offline, forever, for free.

What we charge for is Pro — end-to-end encrypted cloud sync across your devices. That is a real, ongoing infrastructure cost: servers, bandwidth, and the engineering time to keep an encrypted sync protocol secure and reliable. Pro subscribers are paying for that specific service, the same way you would pay for any hosting or storage product. We are not selling your attention, your data, or the pattern of what you write about. We are selling a working sync pipe that happens to be encrypted end-to-end, so that even the pipe itself cannot read what flows through it.

We sell the sync service. Not what's inside it. Our business model depends on protecting your data, not exposing it.

Why this distinction actually matters

A company whose revenue depends on understanding your data — through ads, through data licensing, through "personalization" that requires reading your content — has a structural incentive that quietly works against your privacy over time, no matter what today's privacy policy says. A company whose revenue depends on a subscription for a specific, delivered service has no such incentive. We do not benefit from knowing more about you. We benefit from the sync working reliably, which is a much simpler thing to align with your interests.

What happens to your notes if we disappear

This is the honest follow-up question, and it is worth answering directly: if Prevon shut down tomorrow, your Free-tier vault keeps working exactly as it does today. It was never dependent on our servers to function — it is local software, on your device, encrypted with a key we never had. Pro users would lose the sync service specifically, since that does depend on infrastructure we run, but their local vault stays fully intact and readable. Nothing about our continued existence is a precondition for you being able to open your own notes.

None of this is a request to trust us on faith. The architecture behind these claims is documented in detail on our Trust and Engine pages, and we welcome security researchers to verify them directly — anyone who finds and responsibly discloses a real problem gets permanent public credit on our Hall of Fame page, not a quiet fix and silence.