Always free, no ads, no creepy servers

A lot of people have told me about being willing to see ads to support development. I actually really dislike ads and all the apps that I have used that had ads were slowed down by them. I also notice that certain other IM clients released versions without ads and then pushed updates with them after the user base grew. I find that to be a rather deceptive bait and switch particularly since I know that the ad services collect and use user data --possibly based on your chats-- to present more ads. It is behavior like this, the 3rd party account sign up nonsense and the lack of direct connections that prompted me to write Monal in the first place.

There will always be a free version of Monal, it will always support direct connections and it won't have ads.