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Digital Business Models

Follow the money behind a free service.

Connected topics

Related

Cookies & Browser Storage

A remembered cart explains how a shop finds your items. To understand how a free service earns money, follow the separate business-model question.

Related

Choice & Interfaces

Recurring revenue gives a reason to examine retention; a difficult interface alone does not establish a provider’s intent.

Sources & further reading

  1. Meta — Fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results

    Company-wide annual advertising revenue, reported in millions of US dollars; not the profit of a single app.

  2. Apple Developer — Overview of In-App Purchase types

    Official descriptions of consumables, non-consumables and subscription products.

  3. Spotify — Q4 2025 shareholder deck

    Annual Premium revenue of €15,350 million divided by total revenue of €17,186 million gives approximately 89.3%.

  4. Duolingo — 2025 Form 10-K

    The company's explanation of its free-user and paid-subscription model, not proof that each free user is profitable.

  5. Google — Privacy Policy

    Describes Google's own collection, advertising use and sharing practices; does not represent every app.

  6. FTC — June 2024 final order concerning Avast and Jumpshot

    A historical enforcement case. Allegations and final restrictions should not be generalized to all free services.

  7. Einav, Klopack & Mahoney — Selling Subscriptions, American Economic Review (2025)

    Published AER version, 115(5), 1650–1671; introduction, sample selection and conclusions checked October 27, 2026. Ten selected large US services; inattention and switching costs are not separately identified. Card replacement is not cancellation advice.

  8. Apple Support — Cancel a subscription from Apple

    Official guidance for identifying the account and billing provider, checked October 18, 2026.

  9. Google Play Help — Cancel, pause, or change a subscription

    Official billing, uninstalling, account and access guidance, checked October 18, 2026.

  10. Apple Developer — Offering account deletion in your app

    Explains the distinction between deleting a service account and canceling an Apple-billed subscription.

  11. Google Ads — About dynamic remarketing

    A provider’s technical description of past-visitor product ads; not independent evidence for a specific ad or a promised sales effect.

  12. MDN — Third-party cookies

    First- and third-party context and storage behavior. Browser policies and settings matter.

  13. Google My Ad Center — How personalized ads work

    Google’s stated personalization controls and non-personalized contexts; not every advertising provider’s policy.

  14. MDN — Using HTTP cookies

    Cookies and eligible requests; persistence and session-restoration qualifications. The shop is an explicitly defined fictional model.

  15. MDN — Web Storage API

    Browser storage types and scope; not evidence of a named shop’s implementation.

  16. MDN — Storage quotas and eviction criteria

    Storage limits and possible deletion; no guarantee that local data lasts forever.

  17. OWASP — Session Management Cheat Sheet

    Session lifecycle and explicit server-side invalidation. Recommendations do not establish that every service follows them.