What is Edison’s business model?

Edison Mail was created to preserve the simplicity, speed, and convenience of using email while understanding that most consumers had become accustomed to using email for free—and other paid email clients were failing. Over the years, we have always maintained multiple revenue streams. In the past, the EasilyDo Assistant app included a premium paid version.

Currently, to monetize our business, Edison offers a Developer API service to businesses to extract information from their user's mail to make their products easier to use. You can check some examples of apps that use the Developer API, here. Edison also delivers insightful e-commerce research via the Edison Trends product that we launched July 2017 alongside the rebrand of our company to Edison Software, Inc. Edison Trends is the Edison Software business product that creates research about e-commerce trends from aggregated and anonymized transaction data. To keep services, like Edison Mail and OnMail, free or at an extremely low price for consumers, we trained artificial intelligence (AI) to anonymize and analyze information from commercial messages only (such as promotions and receipts. Our AI does not understand personal messages). Consumers always opt-in to sharing any data and have the option to opt-out of data sharing for Edison Trends research or delete any data.

Research from Edison Trends is regularly used by e-commerce brands, leading national news press, and research companies like IRI and others. You can see examples of research covered by different retail media about companies like Nike, Wayfair, Toys R Us, Weight Watchers, and more on our research page.

Companies like Brave and DuckDuckGo are leaders, showing the multiple privacy focused ways technology companies can make money. As the landscape changes, Edison Software will continue to discuss different privacy focused revenue streams.

Edison will always allow users to opt-out of research if they don’t want to share data, and users will be able to opt-in to our research with OnMail. This is similar to the way Apple asks users to send device data back to their developers, and the way many paid streaming sites upsell content.