How Mellowtel helps us fund tree planting at IdleForest

IdleForest is free to use, but planting trees costs money. Our partnership with Mellowtel is part of how we pay for it.

When you choose to share unused internet bandwidth through IdleForest, Mellowtel’s technology puts some of that spare capacity to work fetching public web pages. Companies pay for those requests, Mellowtel shares revenue with us, and we use that funding to support tree planting.

That’s the connection between the extension on your computer and the planting projects we support. It deserves a little more explanation than “browse the internet, plant trees.”

Your internet connection has a certain amount of capacity. When you’re using less than that, there’s room for other requests. Mellowtel lets IdleForest use a portion of that available bandwidth, with your permission, to retrieve publicly available information. If you’d like more detail, we explain the process on our how it works page.

For us, this makes it possible to offer a way to support reforestation without asking everyone to make a donation. You can use the same browser, visit the same sites, and keep your preferred search engine. Once you’ve enabled sharing, IdleForest can contribute in the background.

Mellowtel handles the technology that makes this exchange possible. Our job is to put the funding to use and show you where it goes.

We fund planting through partners including Trees for the Future, Tree-Nation, and 1ClickImpact. You can find the projects and their records on our transparency page. Those records let you follow what’s been funded and where the planting happens.

Of course, this involves your internet connection, so you should know what you’re agreeing to. Participation is optional. Mellowtel requires explicit opt-in, and you can stop sharing using the planting controls in the IdleForest extension.

Mellowtel says its public web requests run separately from your personal browsing session, without using your browsing history or login cookies. Its privacy documentation covers what the service can see and the technical information it needs to handle requests. We encourage you to read it before deciding to participate.

We want supporting reforestation to be something more people can fit into their lives. Mellowtel helps us offer one way to do that, using a resource people already have. And everyone who chooses to share through IdleForest helps make the funding possible.

If you’d like to join us, you can download IdleForest here.