Pricing
Why zukka isn't free.
Everyone else hands you a messenger for nothing. We ask you to pay. That deserves an honest explanation — not a sales pitch. Here it is.
The part no one tells you
Every other messenger is a courier that forgets you.
When a normal app delivers your message, it's done. The message moves onto your phone and lives there; their server forgets it. One delivery, then nothing. That's cheap — which is exactly why they can give it away.
How everyone else works
Store, forward, forget. Your history piles up on your device. If your phone is lost, searched or seized, it's all right there. Their cost ends at the first delivery — so the price to you is "free" (you pay in other ways; see below).
How zukka works
We keep nothing on your phone. So your encrypted conversations live with us, and we re-deliver them every time you open a chat, on every device, for as long as the conversation exists. One delivery becomes thousands. Storage that never empties, bandwidth that never ends. That is a real, ongoing cost — and it's the price of your phone holding nothing.
What you're actually paying for
You pay us, so you're never the product.
"Free" is rarely free. Most no-cost messengers are funded by the one thing we refuse to touch: you. These are the reasons a subscription isn't a downgrade — it's the whole point.
You are not the product
Ad-funded apps earn from your metadata, your behaviour, your attention. We can't read your data — it's encrypted — and we run no ads. Our only income is your subscription, which means our interests point the same way as yours: we work for you, not for advertisers.
The price is a gate
A paywall quietly keeps out the bots, the spam farms, the scammers and the merely curious. On a free app, anyone walks in. On a paid one, only people who mean it do. Your circle stays clean — by design, not by moderation we can't even perform.
Deliberately small
Free apps need a massive audience for the economics to work. We don't. We want the few hundred thousand who genuinely need this — not the whole world. A small, deliberate audience is a safer audience — less of a target, less noise — and the subscription is what keeps it alive without chasing a crowd.
We can't be forced to betray you
Free "private" apps eventually have to make money — and that's when they change: ads appear, data gets mined, the company is sold. Many have ended exactly there. Being paid from day one means we never reach the moment where survival requires selling you out.
You pay for absences
You're not buying features. You're buying the absence of things: no ads, no tracking, no history on your device, no one mining your conversations. Privacy was never free — someone always pays for it. Either you, with money, or you, with your data.
A boring, honest model
We're not a startup inflating user counts for an exit. A subscription is a plain, sustainable, unglamorous way to run a company — no hype, no hidden incentive, no surprise pivot. Boring is the most trustworthy business model there is.
In fairness
We won't pretend every free app is a trap.
Some free messengers are run honestly — by non-profits, on donations, with real privacy. We respect them. But two things stay true: most free, ad-funded apps still live off your data, and none of them solve the cost of keeping nothing on your device — which is why none of them offer it. That bill is real. We choose to put it on a price tag you can see, instead of hiding it inside your privacy.
Plans
Simple plans. Start free.
Every plan is the full zukka — nothing is held back behind a higher tier. The only difference is how many accounts you get. Try everything free for 30 days; no card needed to start.
30-day free trialPersonal
$8.99/ month
or $83.88 / year — save 22%
- One account
- The complete app — every feature, no limits
- No ads, no tracking, no data mining, ever
- End-to-end encrypted chats, calls and files
Plus
$12.99/ month
or $119.88 / year — save 23%
- Three accounts, each behind its own PIN
- Decoy accounts — hand over a code with nothing of value to find
- Everything in Personal
Annual billing saves you roughly a quarter. Pay whichever way keeps you most private: