A look at Pigeonly, InmateAid, and Flikshop, built by ex-convicts, and how they act as social networks to connect those in prison with friends and family
Olivia Carville / Bloomberg : Tweets: @michigancpr and @ndahlberg Tweets: @michigancpr : Beyond giving prisoners an easier, cheaper and more fulfilling way to communicate, the men who started these apps also want to make inmates less likely to re-offend because they see there's a life to be lived on the outside. #TalkPrison https://www.bloomberg.com/... Nancy Dahlberg / @ndahlberg : Great to see @pigeon_ly in the news today ... Pigeonly, Inmate Aid and Flikshop are offering a cheaper way for families to connect with incarcerated loved ones https://www.bloomberg.com/... via @technology
Context & Ripple Effects
The backdrop is Securus' JPay, which per related coverage makes millions from a monopoly granted by prisons to charge exorbitant per-message email fees — a market built on captive customers. Pigeonly, InmateAid, and Flikshop attack that pricing from the inside: all three were founded by ex-convicts who know the communication gap firsthand, and they position cheap family contact not just as a service but as recidivism prevention.
The Bloomberg profile lands mid-arc in a longer shift: inmates have since turned to contraband phones to build their own channels, prisons have moved toward tablets with calls and messaging under new FCC price caps, and regulators are actively squeezing the legacy fee model. Founder-led startups are one lane of that shift; device and rule changes are the other.
First-order effects
- Incarcerated people and their families get a cheaper alternative to incumbent vendors like Securus' JPay, whose per-message fees the coverage documents as the status quo these apps undercut.
Second-order effects
- Legacy prison-telecom vendors face pressure from two directions at once — founder-led low-cost rivals and the FCC's price caps arriving alongside prison tablet rollouts — forcing their high-margin monopoly economics onto the defensive.
Third-order effects
- If the founders' recidivism argument holds, prison communication stops being treated purely as a revenue concession and starts being judged as rehabilitative infrastructure — shifting procurement criteria for facilities away from whoever pays the highest commission.
The trend: Prison communication is moving from monopolized, high-fee vendor services toward cheaper consumer-style platforms, driven by ex-inmate founders, contraband workarounds, and FCC price regulation.