How ads fund Camlane
Camlane is free, every feature is for everyone, and nothing is held back for people who pay. The Android app shows one small banner ad per screen to pay for the work. That's the whole arrangement.
No paywall
There is no Pro version, no subscription, no in-app purchase, no trial and no watermark. 4K, manual controls, several phones, studio audio, recording, the camera wall and Private AI are available to everyone, in every build. Nothing is limited, slowed down or delayed if you never see an ad.
Where the ads are
Only in the Android app, and only like this:
- One banner on each screen: the device list, the camera screen, settings, about and the QR scanner.
- Part of the layout, never on top. A banner never covers the camera picture or a control. On the camera screen in portrait it sits below the controls, and the preview gets smaller to make room. In landscape and on tablets it sits at the bottom of the control rail.
- Never in dialogs or sheets, and never more than one on screen.
- No full-screen, video, pop-up, rewarded or app-open ads.
- Quiet while you stream. The camera screen’s banner stays, but doesn’t load a new ad until the stream ends. Refreshing it during a stream cost more than 5% in queue delay when we measured, so it doesn’t.
- Nothing offline. Without internet, no ads load and everything works.
The desktop apps have no ads. The desktop app shows a small strip at the bottom of each page asking for sponsorship. It’s read from a static file at most once a day, with no cookies or identifiers, and it’s not an ad network.
Not an adblock wall
Block ads with Private DNS, a firewall or anything else, and Camlane works exactly the same. It doesn’t check, ask you to turn the blocker off, or nag. If you’d rather not see ads, that’s your call.
What the ads know
The ads come from Google AdMob. Google may use your advertising ID, IP address and device information to show and measure ads, under its own policies. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, the app asks for consent first, and you can change your answer in Settings → Privacy & ad choices. Camlane never passes the camera, the microphone or the stream to the ad SDK. Details in the privacy policy.
If an ad gets in the way
An ad that covers the camera picture or a control, two ads at once, or an ad in a dialog or full screen is a bug. Email a screenshot to hello@camlane.live and we’ll fix it. If your frame rate or dropped frames get clearly better with ads blocked, tell us that too, with the stats from both runs.
Other ways to help
If Camlane is useful to you, sponsoring the work directly helps, though it unlocks nothing, because there is nothing to unlock. Telling a friend, or writing to us about a phone that doesn’t work well, helps too.