Truecaller is a popular yet controversial caller ID app that lets people tackle spam calls and messages. You can choose between using the free version or pay up to Rs 270 for a year and get access to multiple premium features.
And if that wasn’t enough, the Scandinavian company has now announced a special Gold version, which basically offers all the premium features and in addition to that some exclusive benefits.
But that’s a basic PR pitch. What really caught our eye is the eye-watering annual fees of Rs 5,000 that you pay to get this Gold service. What exactly does the new feature offer? Read on. It gets interesting.
The Gold service, according to Truecaller, is targeting the top and heavy users of its platform. The company claims there are “people who want show that their calls are important” and “want to stand apart from the crowd”. To get this, “they are willing to pay a premium.”
We got access to the Gold service for a few days and what we’ve mostly seen is our account interface turning into a gold colour (as seen below). In addition to that the calls made and received to and from your number respectively, also show the contact card in gold colour!
We compared this to the regular premium service and found that all features at least for now are the same. However, they do mention “Gold members will get high priority customer help whenever they have any question.” Not exactly sure about the questions that a person can ask from a caller ID app, especially when it doesn’t really merit calling customer support.
To its credit, Truecaller did say that “Gold Caller ID is the first of many unique features we intend to add to Premium Gold subscription, and expect the value to grow over time.” And we’ll have to wait and see what those other unique features will be.
For Rs 5,000, we’re not really sure who the heavy users of the app are, but there must be a strong reason behind pricing it this way. Either ways, we’re finding it hard to recommend the new Gold service to users. However, if there are people willing to shell out over Rs 1 lakh on the gold-edition iPhone, probably that’s where Truecaller is eyeing potential consumers as well.
Many people consider Truecaller a mechanism to track users and get access to information without their consent. That is a privacy grey area, but people also prefer using it for the convenience of avoiding calls, especially spam calls, more than anything else.
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