03 — We & Them
The rows we lose are in here too.
A comparison that only flatters us would tell you nothing, and you would find the missing rows in an afternoon. So this page marks every place a competitor beats us in red, and says what we are doing about it — or that we are not.
The giants
Scale figures are public estimates from 2026 and vary by source; treat them as directional. The column that matters is the third one.
| Platform | Scale | Phone number | E2E by default | E2E calls | Advertising | How it earns |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ~2B+ | Required | Yes | Yes | Yes, since 2025 | Business API, click-to-message ads, in-app ads | |
| ~1.3B | Required | No | No | Yes | Super-app: payments, mini-apps, ads | |
| iMessage | ~1B devices | Apple ID | Yes | Yes | No | Sells hardware |
| Telegram | ~1B | Required | Opt-in only | 1:1 only | Yes | Premium (~$342M by 2023), channel ads |
| Messenger | ~1B | Account | Yes, since 2023 | Mostly | Yes | Ads, business messaging |
| Snapchat | ~800M | Account | Snaps only | No | Yes | Ads, Snapchat+ (~$4/mo) |
| Signal | ~40–70M | Required | Yes | Yes | No | Donations. ~$50M/yr burn, publicly acknowledged as a question |
| Spojiti | pre-launch | Never | Yes, always | Yes, always | Never | Free + Premium /yr India, /yr elsewhere |
The privacy-native field — where the real fight is
These are the people we actually compete with, and the honest read is that each of them is missing exactly one leg. So are we. The question is whether ours is the one that can be fixed with money.
| Project | Users | How it earns | Their strength | The leg they are missing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Signal | ~40–70M | Donations | The brand, a decade of public audits, published formal analyses of their protocol | No revenue model. ~$50M/yr covered by a founder's loan and giving |
| Threema | ~5–10M | One-time purchase, ~CHF 6 | Profitable for a decade. The existence proof that paid, identity-free messaging works | No free tier — you pay before your first message, so it never goes viral. And the store purchase re-attaches the identity the app avoided |
| Session | ~1M | Token staking | Onion-routed, open source, no company infrastructure to compel | No forward secrecy today, by their own documentation. Their Protocol V2 was still in design as of December 2025 |
| SimpleX | niche | Donations and investment | The most radical privacy design in the field — no identifiers at all. Post-quantum first, in 2024. Trail of Bits audits | No revenue model. Signal's fragility on a smaller network |
| Spojiti | pre-launch | Free + Premium, paid on a rail that cannot identify you | Post-quantum authentication ahead of Signal and Apple; anonymous payments; a free tier that never paywalls safety | No users, no audit, not open source yet. All three are what this round buys |
Session has no forward secrecy yet. Threema has no free tier. SimpleX and Signal have no revenue model. We are the only project attempting mainstream usability, zero identity, strongest-available cryptography and customer funding that stays unlinkable — all four at the same time. That is a genuinely defensible square. It is also, today, an empty one: we have not proved we can hold it.
Against Signal, row by row
Signal is the benchmark and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. Here is where each of us actually stands.
| Dimension | Signal | Spojiti | Who wins |
|---|---|---|---|
| Root identity | Phone number at registration; usernames arrived 2024 but the number is still the root | A twelve-word phrase. No number, ever | Spojiti |
| Core protocol | X3DH + Double Ratchet — they invented it | The same science, inherited gratefully | Tie |
| Post-quantum key agreement | In production since 2023 | In production since August 2026 | Closed |
| Post-quantum authentication | Classical signatures | ML-DSA-65 beside Ed25519 on every published key | Spojiti |
| Sender metadata | Sealed sender, years of production | Sealed sender, shipped build 317 | Closed |
| Recipient metadata | Also visible to their servers | Also visible to ours | Neither |
| Protocol assurance | Published formal analyses by outside cryptographers | Known-answer tests on the device and a deliberately small design. No outside analysis | Signal |
| Transparency | Fully open source for a decade, repeatedly audited | Closed and unaudited today. Extraction tooling built; repositories not yet public | Signal |
| Jurisdiction | US non-profit | Indian company under a traceability mandate, and we cannot leave home | Signal |
| Feature surface | Ten years of accumulated product | Three platforms, one year, five people | Signal |
| Sustainability | Donations; ~$50M/yr; a stated open question | Customers pay, and still cannot be identified | Spojiti |
Two places nobody else is
Having said all that, there are two claims we will defend against anyone.
Post-quantum authentication. We carry a post-quantum signature beside the classical one on every published key, and our safety number commits to both. Signal uses classical signatures. Apple's PQ3 uses classical signatures and says it will continue to assess the need. Neither has shipped this leg, and both say so themselves.
Verification on the device, every launch. Signal and Apple verify their cryptographic primitives when they build. We verify ours on your phone, at every launch, against the standards body's own published test vectors — and a device that cannot prove a primitive publishes nothing post-quantum and accepts nothing post-quantum. It fails closed.