how-it-works

Mellowtel allows users who opt-in to share their unused Internet bandwidth with companies who pay for it to access the web. A portion of this revenue is shared with the developer of the app/extension to help them keep their services free and available for everyone and keep improving them.

The business model is centered around sharing unused resources and not on collecting and selling data (not even anonymized data). Mellowtel's technology detects when users have excess resources and shares only idle bandwidth so the browsing experience doesn't get affected.

Users can opt-in or opt-out from sharing their resources at any time from the settings page.

Graphical representation of how Mellowtel works
If a user opts-in then the device's unused resources will be used to give access to the Web to trusted partner. The requests are loaded in an incognito tab so it's impossible to leak user's data. This is done only when there are unused resources and it takes only enough bandwidth to load an additional website in incognito. In this way we ensure user's privacy, security and browsing experience is unaffected. The code is open source on Github so everyone can see how it works and the security measures enforced (rate-limiting, opt-in/opt-out, etc..)