A small company with one job
Keep your email private, get paid fairly for it, go home. That's the whole plan. There is no growth-at-all-costs chapter, no pivot to advertising, no exit strategy that ends with your inbox on someone else's balance sheet.
Where we came from
Scroogle Mail was founded in Zurich in 2021 by Matthias Keller and Nadia Furrer - two engineers who spent the best part of a decade building ad-tech. Bidding systems, tracking pixels, audience profiles: the machinery that turns what you read, buy and write into inventory. They were good at it, which is exactly why they stopped. One too many meetings about "enriching user signals" from people's inboxes, and they decided to build the antidote instead.
The name is a cheeky nod to what happened to email when the search giants got hold of it. Somewhere along the way, the world's most personal correspondence became a data source with a compose button. We thought that deserved a raised eyebrow in the company name - and a proper alternative behind it.
We are bootstrapped. No venture capital, no ad-tech money, no strategic investor waiting for a return. The company has been profitable since 2024, funded entirely by subscriptions from the people who use it. That matters more than it sounds: a business that only answers to its customers has no one else to please, and nothing to gain from reading your mail.
Today we are a team of fourteen, all in Switzerland, running our own hardware in two datacentres - Zurich and Lausanne. Small on purpose. Fourteen people can look after tens of thousands of mailboxes very well; what they can't do is burn money fast enough to need an advertising department.
Switzerland suits the job. It has a long, unfussy tradition of taking privacy seriously, and its data protection law holds adequacy decisions from both the UK and the EU - which means your mail can lawfully stay here, on our hardware, without any legal contortions. We didn't pick it for the scenery. The scenery is a bonus.
Four principles, no small print
Every product decision at Scroogle Mail gets tested against these. If a feature can't pass, it doesn't ship.
Private by default
Privacy shouldn't be a settings hunt. Encryption, tracker blocking and sensible defaults are on from the moment your account exists - on every plan, not just the expensive ones.
Paid by you
Our only customers are our users. Nobody else pays us a penny, so nobody else gets a say in how the product works or what happens to your data. Incentives sorted, permanently.
Built in the open
Our client apps are open source and our independent security audits are published in full - the awkward findings included. You shouldn't have to take a privacy company's word for anything.
Plain English
No dark patterns, no 40-page consent walls, no "are you sure?" mazes. Cancelling your subscription takes two clicks, and we'll tell you exactly what happens to your data when you do.
The world's shortest business model
Subscriptions. That's it. You pay from £2.99 a month; we keep your email private. The end.
- No advertising. We have never shown an ad and never will. There is nothing to target one with anyway.
- No data sales. Your data isn't sold, shared, "anonymised for partners" or fed to anyone's models. It isn't a revenue line; it's a liability we keep as small as possible.
- No "free" tier funded by someone else's data. Free plans get paid for somehow, usually by the people using them. We'd rather charge a fair price and stay answerable to you alone.
Slow, steady and still here
No hockey sticks, no funding rounds. Just a service that gets a bit better every year.
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2021
Founded in Zurich
Matthias and Nadia leave ad-tech, rent a small office in Zurich-West and start building email they'd trust with their own bank statements.
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2022
Private beta
500 mailboxes, mostly friends, family and the terminally curious. The feedback is blunt, Swiss and punctual. The product improves quickly.
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2023
Public launch and first audit
Scroogle Mail opens to everyone, and our first independent security audit is published in full - findings, fixes and all.
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2024
Apps and profitability
iOS and Android apps ship, and the company turns profitable on subscriptions alone. Nobody has to learn what "adtech-adjacent revenue" means.
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2025
12,000 mailboxes, second datacentre
We pass 12,000 protected mailboxes and open our second Swiss datacentre in Lausanne, so your mail lives redundantly on hardware we own and run.
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2026
Encrypted calendar for every plan
Because when you meet, where you go and who you see is exactly as private as what you write.
Fourteen people, no bean bags
A few of the humans who keep your mail running. First names only - we take our own privacy advice.
Matthias
Spent ten years building ad targeting systems. Now atones for it professionally, one encrypted mailbox at a time.
Nadia
Wrote her first encryption tool at fourteen to stop her brother reading her email. He never managed it. Neither will we.
Livia
Runs the Zurich and Lausanne datacentres and takes an unscheduled fan spin-up as a personal insult.
Reto
Answers every ticket as if his grandmother sent it: patiently, in plain English, and without once saying "have you tried turning it off".
Anna
Believes an email app should open before you've finished your first sip of coffee, and holds the release builds to it.
Jonas
Reads spam all day so you don't have to. Sends his regards to the spammers; the spammers do not send theirs back.
Writing about us?
For journalists
Email press@scrooglemail.com and a founder - not an agency - will get back to you, usually the same working day. Boilerplate you're welcome to lift:
Scroogle Mail is a Swiss, paid-only encrypted email provider founded in Zurich in 2021. It carries no advertising, sells no data, stores mail with zero-access encryption in two Swiss datacentres, and publishes its independent security audits in full.
Our logo pack and founder headshots are in the press kit, available on request - the one place you will find our faces, since we don't put photos on the website.
We hire rarely and carefully - open roles appear here first.
There are no open roles right now. When there are, this page will say so before anywhere else does.
Fourteen people, two datacentres, one job.
If you'd rather your email answered to a small company in Zurich than to an advertising department, you know what to do.
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