"Free" in software usually means one of two things. Either it's a trial dressed up as a gift, or you're the product — your attention resold, your behavior bundled into a profile and shipped to an ad network that knows more about you than your friends do.
We wanted a free plan that was neither. Not because we're saints, but because the second option is incompatible with the product. Wading works by getting people to talk honestly to a patient listener. An app that turns those conversations into an advertising asset would poison the thing that makes it work. Nobody talks freely to something they suspect is taking notes for someone else.
So here's the whole arrangement, in public, including the parts that cost us money.
What the free plan is
Unlimited days, capped conversation: 30 messages a day with Wade, in text. Voice is subscriber-only, because a spoken conversation is genuinely expensive to run and we'd rather cap it honestly than degrade it quietly.
Everything else is the real product. Same tutor, same memory, same immersion dial, same vocabulary tracking. The free plan isn't a hobbled demo — it's the app, metered.
What a sponsor gets
Some free conversations carry a sponsored mention. At most one per day, never as the first thing you see, and never spoken aloud in a voice conversation — a spoken ad can't carry a visible label, and an ad you can't identify as an ad isn't one we're willing to run.
Every mention appears in its own bordered card, headed SPONSORED, with the sponsor's real name on the link. The label is stored with the message, so when you scroll back through that conversation weeks later it's still marked. Wade will not blend an ad into his own reply, and no sponsor can buy a place in the lesson itself — not which words you're taught, not what he corrects, not what he recommends outside the card.
What the sponsor receives about you is: nothing. No name, no email, no device id, no conversation, no interests, no advertising identifier. Not "anonymized" — nothing. Sponsor selection happens entirely on our own servers, so there is no request to an ad network to leak in the first place.
At the end of a month a sponsor gets three numbers: how many times their message was shown, how many people tapped it, and how many distinct learners saw it. That last one is counted inside our database and reduced to a single integer before it ever leaves — a delivery report can't name an audience even in principle, because it never holds one.
The parts that cost us money
An honest version of this page has to include what we turn down.
Sensitive topics never target advertising. Health, faith, politics, sexuality, money, grief, legal trouble, anything mainly about another person — flagged when recorded, and excluded from ad matching at the point the data is read. Someone going through a hard year is exactly who a certain kind of advertiser pays a premium to reach. We don't sell that, and we built the code so we can't sell it without rewriting the query on purpose.
No behavioral profiles, no data brokers, no cross-site anything. We run no analytics service on this site. No pixels, no tracking cookies, nothing that follows you anywhere. That means we know less about our own funnel than most companies our size. We decided we could live with that.
No gambling, weapons, tobacco or vaping, adult content, payday lending, miracle health claims, or crypto speculation. We pick sponsors by hand. Each one is a company we'd be comfortable seeing next to a language lesson, which is a much shorter list than "anyone who'll pay".
Candidates and campaigns, under rules tighter than anything else here. We do accept them — local races struggle to reach anyone, and that's a real problem — but only in the US, only where we know your state, never in states that put archive duties on the platform, always naming who paid, and never targeted on anything you said to Wade. There's a switch to refuse the category outright, and a separate, off-by-default questionnaire if you'd rather see ones closer to your own views. Your answers there never leave our servers.
The honest tension
Advertising and privacy pull against each other. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, probably you.
Our resolution is that the sponsor pays for reach, not for knowledge. They tell us who they'd like to reach; our servers decide, privately, whether you're in that group; you see a labeled card. The advertiser learns a count. That's a worse business than the one we could run with the same data, and it's the one we want to still be running in five years.
If you'd rather have none of it, subscribing turns sponsors off entirely — not as a punishment for staying free, just as the other way to pay for the same server time.
And if you stay on the free plan forever, that's genuinely fine. It's a real plan, not a trap. Come wade in.