Threema – European messaging app
Swiss encrypted messaging app requiring no phone number or email to register. End-to-end encrypted messages, calls, and groups. One-time purchase of CHF 4.99, with no subscription, no ads, and no data mining. Used by Swiss government and military.
Quick facts
A one-time purchase instead of a subscription is rare in messaging, and no phone number or email is needed – just a randomly generated ID – with the added trust signal of being used by the Swiss government and army.
The paid-upfront model is a real barrier compared with free rivals like Signal, and the server staying closed-source means you can't fully verify what happens once a message leaves your device.
Why does it score 95?
Incorporated in Pfäffikon, Switzerland – an EFTA country rather than a full EU member state.
Independently owned and bootstrapped, with no outside investors.
Threema runs its own infrastructure in Switzerland rather than a third-party cloud.
The clients are open source (AGPL), but the server remains proprietary, so it's only partially open source overall.
See how they compare
Threema
Signal
Imessage 
Whatsapp 
Telegram 
Messenger 
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