Challenge
IdleForest's whole promise is that it costs the user nothing: no subscription, no donation, no signup, no email. That promise created a hard problem. The team — co-founders Daniel Ibanez Becker and Tobias Stein, building out of Lisbon (idleforest.com) — needed a way to pay for reforestation while keeping the product free.
The obvious options didn't fit. Ads would clutter a product whose audience is environmentally conscious and privacy-sensitive, and would undercut the mission. Donations would put the cost back on users without guaranteeing recurring funding. Selling browsing data was also incompatible with a product built on trust and transparency.
IdleForest needed revenue that was recurring, honest about where the money comes from, and safe enough to survive an audit by the exact kind of user who reads the privacy policy before installing.
Solution
IdleForest monetizes with Mellowtel, which matched the product's constraints instead of fighting them.
Opted out by default. Users are opted out until they explicitly choose to share bandwidth, and can revoke consent at any time (mellowtel.com). For a privacy-sensitive audience, consent isn't a checkbox — it's the pitch.
Sessionless, no personal data. The data tasks routed through a user's spare bandwidth do not use users’ cookies or browsing history (how it works). That let IdleForest publish a transparency page and open-source its code on GitHub without anything to hide.
No ads, no paywall. Mellowtel activates only when spare capacity is available, prioritizing users’ browsing while keeping the product free — exactly what the mission requires (mellowtel.com).
Revenue that comes from a real client, not the user. Companies pay to fetch public web data through that shared bandwidth; Mellowtel splits 55% of that revenue back to the developer (mellowtel.com). That payment — not the user's wallet — is what funds the trees.
The model does the thing IdleForest couldn't do with ads or donations: it turns idle capacity users were already wasting into steady, mission-aligned funding.
Results
18 million requests processed. Opted-in bandwidth has handled 18 million sessionless data requests — the work that generates the revenue (IdleForest-reported first-party metric).
$5,000 in total contributions. Those requests have converted into $5,000 routed to verified reforestation (IdleForest first-party metric).
Nearly 10,000 trees funded. That $5,000 has funded nearly 10,000 trees through verified planting partners (IdleForest first-party metric), with 5,105 already planted and verified through partner certificates (IdleForest Annual Report).
$700 in monthly recurring revenue. IdleForest now runs at $700 MRR from Mellowtel — recurring funding, not one-off donations, which is what keeps trees going in the ground month after month (IdleForest first-party metric).
That funding flows to established reforestation partners — Trees for the Future, Tree-Nation, and 1ClickImpact — each with published planting records, with projects in regions like Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania (transparency page, Annual Report). The product carries a 4.8-star rating across 33 Chrome Web Store reviews (how it works), alongside a reported community of 1,000+ users (idleforest.com).
In Daniel's words:
"Mellowtel helps us plant trees worldwide. Thanks to users sharing idle internet bandwidth, we can fund verified reforestation projects and offset carbon emissions while keeping IdleForest free for everyone."
— Daniel Ibanez Becker, Co-Founder & CEO, IdleForest (testimonial published on mellowtel.com)
If you're a developer weighing your options
IdleForest didn't trade its principles for revenue — it found revenue that fit its principles. Opt-in, sessionless, no ads, open to audit, and recurring. If you're keeping a product free and don't want to sell your users to do it, that's the model Mellowtel is built for.
Start earning with Mellowtel: https://mellowtel.com