When something is free it usually is paid for by selling my data, as the free-tier of a paid product, or the owners haven't figured out how to make money on it and are hoping to figure that out later.
We don't but it helps with marketing and has synergies with other paid products
Most of the traffic is P2P. We operate a couple of geo distributed relays for NAT'd traffic. But everything is 100% e2e encrypted thanks to webrtc.
It's mostly a tool for us and something that helps sell our other products, but we decided to split it out as a separate app so that it could be used independently. All we collect is a name and email, and even those can be pseudonymous.
When something is free it usually is paid for by selling my data, as the free-tier of a paid product, or the owners haven't figured out how to make money on it and are hoping to figure that out later.