Today we announce that all of our current beta customers and anyone new who joins Tenta from now through July 4th will receive two years of Tenta Pro VPN for free. What’s the catch? There are none. Just download Tenta, create your account using any email address you prefer and that’s it. If you still believe it’s too good to be true, we have two main reasons why we’re running what seems like a crazy promotion and why we believe it’s the right thing to do.

First, this is a big thank you to all our early fans and beta testers who have been with us since the beginning. Building a startup, especially a privacy-focused startup, in the world of big data is an uphill battle. What truly motivates us to keep running up that steep hill is the ten thousand plus reviews and emails we’ve received so far, the majority of which are positive, encouraging and helpful critiques. We’re especially thankful for all our current paying beta customers. Every dollar of your support has helped us get this far. If you just recently purchased a subscription, you will get two bonus years added on top of your current subscription.

Secondly, we will always offer the fastest VPN location for free, but will start charging to unlock all locations after July 4th, 2019. We believe that the core features of a private and secure browser should be free, so this is our effort to balance our free vs paid subscription model that’s sustainable long term. This is the biggest change from our current model where all locations are free and we only charge for device wide VPN, so we think it’s only fair to give everyone a few weeks of time to sign up and take advantage of the two year free VPN deal.

Taking a Page from the Whatsapp Playbook

I remember first reading why Whatsapp doesn’t sell ads on their blog almost seven years ago. Whatever you think of them now that they are a part of Facebook, back then their blog was a source of inspiration for a different type of tech company, one not based on collecting and selling your data. They foresaw the problem with the advertising model and warned that if you’re not paying for anything, you are the product. They knew what a great SMS app should work like and had a super simple model: $1 a year. We loved the simplicity of this subscription based relationship with their customers and laser focus on building great features. When we started Tenta, that was the exact same vision we had in mind.

Today all the top ten browsers are based on the advertising model and sell your digital identity to pay their bills. We believe there should exist one true alternative that is aligned with your interest in privacy and protects your identity instead. Over the past few months, we’ve experimented with a variety of business models and gathered data on our cost of running a VPN browser business. Our mission is to make private browsing ubiquitous, therefore getting to $1/year would no doubt help adoption. However, the cost of running a VPN is higher than an SMS app, but we studied the numbers and we’re confident that $1/month is viable. Therefore, after July 4th, we’re dropping prices drastically and offering Tenta Pro for $1/month. We also conducted surveys from tens of thousands of beta testers and learned that around the world, the $1/month price point would convert more users to paying for a truly private browser. We’re hoping that’s true at scale and we’re excited to give this a shot.

Alternative Payment Options also Available

On the other hand, we’re also working on other ways we can pay our bills from customers who can’t or will simply never pay for a subscription service. For example, there is incredible value in having our non-paying customers share Tenta with their friends and family, so we will soon enable ways to earn Tenta with user referrals. Secondly, there are many amazing privacy-protecting apps available today, so we will offer a browser marketplace of apps that can subsidize your Tenta Pro subscription for those that can’t pay. For instance, sign up for a password manager, install a crypto wallet, switch to a Facebook alternative. Many of these services are willing to pay for signups or installs, so we will use this revenue to cover your VPN bandwidth costs. We may explore other revenue alternatives in the future, but whatever we decide, we guarantee that they will always follow the first principles of protecting our users’ digital identity, rather than exploiting it.

So from now through July 4th, install Tenta and get two years of VPN for free. No strings attached. If you feel so inclined, share this gift of privacy with your friends and family. Spreading the word helps just as much. We’re setting no limit on how many people can sign up. With this special offer, we’re looking forward to growing our community even more and if you have any questions or concerns, reach out anytime.