The short version
Lounge is free to use and costs nothing to text with. Lounge Plus is $9.99 once — not a subscription, not a renewal, nothing to cancel. There are no ads in the app at any tier, and there is no advertising or analytics SDK inside it.
Why free texting apps show you ads
Building and maintaining a messaging app takes years. If it is free and there is nothing to buy, the money has to come from somewhere, and in practice it comes from advertising. That means an ad network inside the app that reads a conversation list, and usually an analytics SDK beside it reporting what you do.
Some apps are straightforward about it and sell an ad-removal purchase. That is a fair deal, and better than most. But the SDKs are generally still in the package after you pay — what you bought was the absence of the banner, not the absence of the code.
The other common model is a subscription, usually to pay for a server that syncs your messages. That is an honest cost for a real service. It also means your texts live on somebody else’s computer.
What Lounge does instead
Lounge has no server, so there is nothing recurring to pay for. One purchase, once, and the app is yours. It works the same offline, on a plane, and five years from now if we stop writing it.
Here is the split, stated plainly so you can judge it before installing.
Free, with no asterisk: SMS and MMS, group messaging, photos, GIFs and voice messages, all twelve themes and the custom theme builder, all four conversation list styles, spam filters you write, per-conversation self-destruct, one-time code cleanup, search, archive, highlights, mute, scheduled messages, and two of the seven send buttons.
Lounge Plus, $9.99 once: auto-reply with rules, five more send buttons, repeating schedules, and creating a vault and moving conversations into it.
The part most paywalls get wrong
Moving a conversation into the vault removes it from Android’s message database. The vault then holds the only copy.
So an existing vault keeps working whether or not Plus is owned. You can always unlock it, read it, reply in it and move conversations back out. Locking somebody out of their own messages because a purchase lapsed would destroy data, and no paywall is allowed to do that.
“No ads” should mean the code too
It is worth being precise about what is absent, because “ad-free” is a claim almost anyone can make about a paid tier.
Lounge contains no advertising SDK, no analytics SDK and no crash reporting SDK. It has no account system. And it does not declare the internet permission, so even if something were in there, Android would not let it connect. That last part is checkable from the Play listing before you install — here is how.
Try it
Lounge is on Google Play. Free, with a one-time unlock for the extras — no subscription, no account, nothing to cancel.