How Truecaller Makes Money

Truecaller is a Swedish internet offering a collaborative global phone directory. Truecaller provided a dynamic, collaborative phone directory using crowdsourcing with high data integrity. It is a free application which anyone can use over his or her mobile phone but how Truecaller makes money?

Earlier the revenue model of Truecaller was freemium. Initially, Truecaller imported national phone directory available into the system but the amount of data was not sufficient and the quality of data was low. Consequently, a shift was made to a collaborative model where the users are a part of building up the content in the service. With users more than 100 million; it is the biggest giant in the phone networking. By providing intelligent, relevant and personal mobile experience, it is benefiting billions of mobile users. The annual revenue of Truecaller reached up to $4.4M as of 2015 and the Truecaller is targeting 200 million figure by 2016.

So how did Truecaller made such a makeable growth? How it really earns money?

1. Truecaller makes Money by providing Premium Services to its Users

Truecaller earns the biggest part of its revenue by charging for its premium services. Instead of fix monthly of annual charges, Truecaller provides a lot of facilities for premium members. Premium services of Truecaller are starting from $0.99 per month. It depends on what facilities or services you want to avail. Truecaller Premium users have a blue badge on their profile. As of now, you can access following facilities if you pay Truecaller:

• Viewers on your profile: Users can see who have visited their profile and how many times they have been visited by other users. Not only this, you can also see the time of visit! As of now, this facility is only available for Android users.
• Erasing advertisements: Users can get rid of annoying advertisements by just paying Truecaller for premium services. The browsing of contact can be a lot easier and smoother after it.
• Monthly Contact Requests: Under this feature, you can send requests to 30 Truecaller users to see their contact information. An SMS would be sent on their registered number which will include the sender’s Truecaller name, to grant the permission or reject it.

2. Truecaller Generates Revenue by Advertising

Advertisements are a very important way of revenue generation for Truecaller. You must have experience advertisement pop-ups during browsing through the App. Sponsor pay and advertisement channels are used. For example- you can get premium membership of Truecaller for free for 1 complete day for watching one complete featured video, this will also generate good revenue.

3. Truecaller charges for App installation to I-phone and Blackberry users

Truecaller App is only free for Android Users. For rest of iPhone and Blackberry users, it is not a free affair. Truecaller makes money by charging the cost to I-phone and Blackberry App users. For I phone users, Truecaller costs INR 120 per month only, the same case with Blackberry and Windows users! Though it is free for Android users, if they want to switch to a premium account, the only option left is to buy it.

4. ‘Truecaller Professional’ service

Though Truecaller is a free app. But for those who want to enhance their Truecaller experience at the professional level, Truecaller offers ‘Truecaller Pro’ service. It is paid service of Truecaller. This service is used by many business ventures for marketing purpose.

Being a Professional Truecaller user means you hold the golden badge crown on your profile. You are entitled to use Contact requests when you want to connect with someone who has their information available on request. What is Contact Request? Contact requests are used when you search for someone by name or are using the discover tab. Since people may have their information protected via Truecaller’s privacy controls, Truecaller needs to notify them that we are interested in connecting!

5. Truecaller collaborates with leading mobile service providers

Truecaller collaborates with leading mobile service providers to make its next big move in earning revenues. By such association, Truecaller provides facilities to the users of its partner mobile service providers. The services include premium membership and search of some fix contacts per month. If a user wants to search more contacts they need to pay to the mobile service and they pay back to Truecaller.

Recently Truecaller announces its collaboration with Tata Docomo. Tata Docomo customers will get a premium subscription and data usage for Truecaller app. This has been done to catapult Truecaller usage in India. The free premium features are only applicable for 90 days, after that the need to pay to avail further services.

Truecaller has currently partnered with Gionee, Obi, Airtel, Micromax, Tata Docomo, Celkon, Cyanogen, and Microsoft whilst generating most of its revenue from bringing in more premium subscription.

6. Truecaller charges to access exclusive contacts

Truecaller has the largest database of phone dictionary. They contain numbers from a normal to a celebrity or you can say very exclusive contact. But they are not accessible for free. Truecaller charges a huge amount of money for sharing those contacts to its customers. This is their main business actually. The information they stored is very precious!

Apart from these, Truecaller is working on the product named ‘Native Dialer’ combining the concepts of true dialler and true caller. It’s partnership with India’s Intex to offer a native phone dialer. All Intex devices are coming with Truecaller and True-messenger incorporated inside it. The Company will also generate revenue by providing premium users True-messenger. In addition, Truecaller has had a strategic partnership with Microsoft and Twitter also. By These partnerships, Truecaller makes a lot of money and contribute to increasing its revenue.