Our promise
Kyoto Unknown is free. Forever.
No ads. No tracking. No accounts. No paid tier. Not now, not later, not ever.
Free forever
Every feature in the app is free. We will never add a paid tier. We will never charge for places, filters, maps, offline access, or anything we build in the future. If a feature ships, it's free.
No ads
You will never see an advertisement in Kyoto Unknown. Not a banner, not a sponsored place, not a "promoted" result. Where we link to a booking site or an official website, it's because it's useful to you — not because we're paid to. We have no affiliate agreements, no referral fees, and no commercial relationships with any place in the app. Every recommendation is based on experience and local knowledge. Nothing else.
No tracking
We don't track you. No analytics SDKs, no crash-reporting tools that phone home with user data, no third-party pixels. The app works offline because it doesn't need to talk to us.
No accounts
You don't sign up. You don't create a profile. You don't hand over an email. Download, open, use. That's it.
No personal data. Ever.
We don't collect your name, email, location history, or any personal information. We don't know who you are. We don't want to. Your bookmarks, collections, and preferences stay on your device and nowhere else.
Why we're saying this in public
A lot of apps start free and slowly erode. They add ads when funding dries up. They lock features behind subscriptions. They sell user data. They get acquired.
We're writing this commitment on a public page so there's nothing to quietly change later. This page is intentionally not behind a login, not a PDF, not buried in a settings menu. It's a public URL that anyone can link to, screenshot, or archive. If we ever break any of these promises, it will be visible, and you're welcome to hold us to it.
If Kyoto Unknown can't sustain itself on its current model — free, ad-free, no tracking, no paid tier — we'll shut it down before we change the model. The promise is the product.
How do we sustain it then?
It's a small operation. No server, no backend, no growth team, no investors to answer to. Hosting costs are negligible. The app is built once and ships to everyone.
If someday we need help, we'll ask — openly, on this page, with specifics. Never by injecting ads, never by selling data, never by adding a subscription.