Helium Mobile pulls the freemium lever to jumpstart salesHelium Mobile pulls the freemium lever to jumpstart sales

Helium Mobile, a T-Mobile MVNO with a cryptocurrency play, said it will offer a free tier of service. The move is likely intended to help the company rekindle growth in a customer base that appears to be stagnating around 100,000.

Helium Mobile's new "Zero Plan" offers 3GB of data, 300 texts and 100 minutes and is "completely free with no contracts, hidden fees or gimmicks," according to the company.

The MVNO is hoping the offering will ultimately entice customers onto its two paid plans:

Separately, Helium Mobile also announced its new "Cloud Points" program. The program allows subscribers to earn points by participating in activities like anonymized location sharing, referrals and surveys. Customers can spend their points on gift cards and other goodies.

In that "Cloud Points" program, Helium appears to be borrowing a page from the likes of Boost Mobile, Surge, Blyk, Amazon Prime phones, Xero Mobile, Virgin Mobile's SugarMama, Sliide, Opera and Aquto, to name a few. Such players have also tried to reward users for completing tasks with some kind of point system.

However, those kinds of programs can often come off as scammy, and they generally haven't been successful in the US wireless industry.

For Helium though, the anonymized location sharing portion of its "Cloud Points" plan is critical. That's because location data will help the company build a cryptocurrency-based Wi-Fi offload network in locations where there is demand for additional wireless network coverage. More on that later.

Beware 'free' wireless service

With a freemium business model, Helium is following a well-trodden path.

Indeed, the Internet has proven to be a breeding ground for freemium business model iterations. For example, most iOS and Android games offer a free experience to entice users into the game, with the hopes that at least some of those gamers end up spending money on premium upgrades (like faster cars or different characters) later. It's that free-to-paid conversion rate that's the key element in any freemium model. That rate can range from 4% for Dropbox to 26% for Spotify.

In the US wireless industry, several wireless providers including Sprint, T-Mobile and FreedomPop have toyed with similar "free" service offerings. However, the freemium business model appears tricky to implement in wireless.

For example, some have argued that FreedomPop's early efforts at freemium services were successful – some calculations would indicate that FreedomPop's free-to-paid conversion rate was around 16%.

But FreedomPop's freemium business model doesn't appear to have had much stamina. Today, FreedomPop no longer offers free wireless services and instead the brand appears to be tackling the market for seniors, complete with basketballer Julius "Doctor J" Erving as a spokesperson.

As for Sprint (which was acquired by T-Mobile in 2020), the company said its offer of a free year of service in 2017 was not successful: "Sprint also launched a campaign aimed at Verizon customers offering 12 months of free 'Sprint Unlimited' service, including unlimited talk, text messaging, 4G LTE data, HD streaming video, and 10 gigabytes of data per line for mobile hotspot access each month," the carrier wrote. "Sprint has continuously promoted prices that saved Verizon customers hundreds of dollars a year (e.g., even promotions offering 50% off Verizon prices), yet Verizon customers who port in to Sprint tend to port back to Verizon at a significantly higher rate than Sprint's other competitors. Thus, the savings through price discounting has not been enough to offset either real or perceived network differences. The net results show in almost every month of 2017 and 2018 Sprint lost more customers to Verizon than it gained from Verizon."

Flagging growth

Helium launched nationwide MVNO services on top of T-Mobile's network in May 2023. Due to the company's cryptocurrency-based structure, its customer growth is publicly available. So far the company has had around 127,000 customer sign ups since it launched.

However, its growth rate slowed significantly toward the end of last year. For example, its customer signup count grew just 7% in the fourth quarter of 2024, from 116,578 signups to 124,775. That's far slower than the 183% growth rate the company saw in the first quarter of 2024, when it grew from 26,196 to 74,266 signups.

In comparison, during the fourth quarter of 2024, T-Mobile gained 903,000 postpaid phone customers and Verizon gained 426,000 postpaid phone customers (though such comparisons are difficult considering Verizon and T-Mobile are both massive corporations that dwarf the likes of Helium in marketing reach).

Still, MVNOs in the US wireless industry often face significant challenges in growing beyond a few hundred thousand customers. For example, Lyca Mobile entered the US market through an MVNO with T-Mobile in 2012, but today it only counts around 542,000 customers.

Finally, it's worth noting that Helium Mobile today still operates a customer waitlist. "We're invite-only right now," the company advises on its website. Whether that's due to artificial scarcity or something else is unclear.

The offloading angle

Helium pioneered the market for DeWi (decentralized wireless), although today players in the space use the acronym "DePIN," for decentralized physical infrastructure network. Broadly, companies in the DePIN industry leverage blockchain technology to encourage individuals to contribute physical resources (like computing power, storage space or renewable energy) to a shared network. The goal is to build a more democratized and efficient infrastructure.

Helium's first attempt at the model was to use its own cryptocurrency to encourage individuals to build LoRa transmission sites for an Internet of things (IoT) network. While the network at one point spanned almost a million sites, it has never generated much usage. According to one estimate, Helium's IoT network today generates around $15,000 in annual recurring revenues.

That's why Helium pivoted into the cellular industry in the 2021 timeframe. As with its IoT network, it hoped to use crypto rewards to encourage users to build a 4G network in the CBRS spectrum band. However, the technical details of 4G proved too hard, and Helium last year pivoted its effort into Wi-Fi.

Today, Helium boasts around 26,000 Wi-Fi sites. Importantly, AT&T and T-Mobile are among the six carriers that are now offloading their customers onto those Wi-Fi locations.

And that's why Helium Mobile – the company's MVNO business – is so keen to obtain its customers' location data. The company uses that location data to determine where it should use its DePIN model to encourage individuals to install additional Wi-Fi sites.

The crypto angle

As a high-level player in the DePIN sector, Helium's fortunes are closely tied to the broader cryptocurrency market. That market received a massive boost from the election of President Trump, a proponent of digital currency. Indeed, the price of Bitcoin – the sector's most popular currency – is now at an all-time high.

But Helium's cryptocurrency hasn't enjoyed the same bump. It has fallen significantly from its heydays in 2021 and 2022.

Regardless, some continue to believe Helium is destined for growth. According to an estimate from a pair of crypto investors and analysts, Helium's Wi-Fi offload business is worth around $1 million in annual recurring revenues, and its MVNO business is worth about the same.

"With a few more years of growth, Helium will flip legacy MVNOs in scale and profitability," the authors of the report wrote, comparing the company to other MVNOs like Boost Mobile and Mint Mobile.

They also calculated that Helium's "valuation per subscriber" is around $10,000, far higher than that of established telecom operators like T-Mobile ($3,300) or AT&T ($2,300). A calculation that would undoubtedly give longtime players in the US wireless industry a chuckle, particularly if those Helium customers are signed up for the MVNO's new "Zero Plan."

Article updated February 5 to clarify the number of Helium's LoRa sites.