Our kids' app is free with no business model behind it. How do you make "free" believable?
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Dino Kids has no paywall, no ads and no in-app purchases. Our software company funds it as a community project, not a revenue line.
We assumed "free" would be the easy part. But free with no visible business model can read as a red flag: plenty of free apps make money from data or ads later, or simply disappear. If we were the parent, we'd ask "what's the catch?" too.
What we do today: a plain-language privacy page, saying openly who funds it and why, and not requiring an account at all. We honestly don't know which of these, if any, changes minds.
If you've built something free (open source, side project, community tool): what made people trust that it would stay free and stay around? And as a user, what makes you trust one?
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I'd trust it more if the store listing said who pays for it and what still works offline. If the core activity can run in airplane mode, that's something a parent can check in a minute.
what makes me trust a free thing is a public promise w teeth, like if you ever stop funding it you open source it or keep it up for x yrs. a tiny page w roughly what it costs to run and who pays goes a long way too, "community project" alone sounds a bit vague