Zello

Zello describes itself as a walkie-talkie, and the description is literal: it turns a phone into a radio, you push a button, and you are talking. It is really two products wearing one name — a free app for friends and family, and a paid service for workplaces — and the company keeps them apart deliberately rather than selling the free one short. The scale claims on its own pages are large and its own: more than 150 million users in over 200 countries. The pitch is that it works where other things do not, and the emergency page makes the strongest version of that case, describing a service that keeps going when networks become unstable. The support pages quietly add the condition: the device has to be online, and the service is unavailable in some countries for reasons of sanctions.

You hold a button and talk, and everyone on the channel hears you as you speak — audio plays over whatever else the phone is doing, including with the screen locked, which is the feature that makes the radio comparison feel accurate rather than nostalgic. Channels are the unit of everything, and they come in four kinds: one anyone can talk in, one where new listeners are held back until they are trusted, a stricter version of the same idea, and a listen-only channel that supports nothing but an audience. Channels can be public or restricted to a group, and you can subscribe to as many as you like. Turn-taking is enforced rather than negotiated: in a public channel a speaker is limited to 20 seconds at a time, after which anyone else can take the floor. Messages reach everyone connected at once, and if a listener is offline the message waits for them. How many people fit in one channel is a question the company answers three ways — the stores say 6,000, the terms say up to 10,000, and a support article says there is no limit at all.

The free app is genuinely free, and the paid product is a different product rather than an unlocked version of the same one, which is unusual and worth crediting. The restriction that matters is buried in the terms instead of the pricing page: using the free service for a commercial purpose is a violation unless you are on a paid subscription, and the support pages repeat it. Zello Work is sold per user, at 8 dollars a month or 6.80 if billed annually, with a larger tier above it and an enterprise tier priced only by conversation, and education and non-profit customers get a discount on annual billing. Archiving is where the paid tiers show their purpose: keeping every voice message, photo and text for up to two years and exporting them is a feature of the higher tier, not the free one. Emergency services are the exception the company is proudest of, and it says so twice with slightly different terms — free for first responder organisations, free for 5 years and renewed automatically each year, but the agreement those organisations sign says either party may end it at any time, and the two pages disagree about what share of a team has to be responders to qualify.

The age rules live only in the legal text and do not agree with each other: the terms bar anyone under 13 and require a guardian's approval under 18, while the privacy policy says that by using the service you affirm you are at least 18. Encryption is partial in a way worth stating precisely, because the marketing does not. Voice messages sent privately to a contact are end-to-end encrypted. Voice in a channel is not encrypted, because channels are open to the public by default, and the terms make clear that anyone with the link can be in the room. The paid product encrypts in transit between each side and the server, which is a different guarantee from end-to-end. Zello says it does not store the voice communications users send, and that conversation history lives on the device rather than with the company — but it also warns, in the same policy, that other people in a channel can save and replay what you say. Even the retention figures conflict: the policy promises to keep retrying an undelivered message for 7 days, while a support article puts the maximum at 14. Moderation is deliberately light on the voice side, since the company states its staff do not listen to conversations and that what it reviews is reported images, with channel owners held responsible for what is shared in their channels. Reports can be filed against a profile, a channel or an image, and there is no way to report anything inside a one-to-one conversation. A ban is permanent and cannot be undone, a blocked channel cannot be recovered, and blocking a contact does not hide them from you in a channel you share. The acceptable use policy adds the sentence a reader should keep: Zello is not a substitute for emergency services.

Two audiences that barely overlap. On the free side it is friends, families, hobby groups and small communities — including people who want to run a one-way channel as a kind of radio show — and anyone whose work takes them somewhere with poor signal. On the paid side it is shift-based businesses in retail, transport, hospitality, construction, aviation and manufacturing, where a push-to-talk button replaces a phone call, and emergency services, who are the audience the company writes about with the most conviction and the one it gives the product to. It is not for anyone who needs an encrypted private conversation with a group, because that is the thing the architecture does not offer.

The cleanest split between free and paid in this batch and the muddiest published facts about itself. Free really is free, Work really is a different product, and first responders really are given the paid one — that is a coherent business, and the free app does not feel hollowed out to sell the other. Against that, the numbers a reader would want are inconsistent across the company's own pages: the capacity of a channel, the wait before an undelivered message is dropped, and the proportion of a team that must be first responders all have two or three answers each. The safety picture is the most important part and the least advertised: private messages to a contact are end-to-end encrypted, but channel voice is not, and the same policy that promises the company keeps no recording of your voice also tells you that the other people listening can keep one. Add a reporting system that cannot see inside a private call and a block that does not follow a person into a shared channel, and the honest summary is a radio with a small private corner and a large public one.