The founder was really open about it. And back then hosting had ~$100 CPA and we had instances where we wouldn't turn a profit on a customer who purchased a shared hosting account UNLESS they renewed after 2 years given the cost to acquire.
To this day, when I see lists reviewing services providers, I'm always skeptical of them and steer away from letting them influence my decision on a service provider.
We kind of got lumped into the VPN segment back in the day, despite being a hardware product. The cutthroat nature of the existing media agreements (NordVPN and Express VPN mainly) along with the sky high CPMs they were paying made it impossible for us to acquire customers and keep them long enough to pay our bills.
Pretty smart tactic... if you're them. Quite bad for the consumer though.
What say you about Mullvad?
As for Mullvad, I think it's a solid service. If one needs a VPN, and doesn't want to use Windscribe for whatever reason, I always recommend IVPN or Mullvad. Windscribe is spiritually based on IVPN (I used it for many years before WS existed). No advertising, no affiliate program, no BS claims.
At the end of the day, it tunnels your friggen packets to a remote endpoint, nothing more. That alone has virtually zero impact on privacy (safe a few exceptions, like Linux ISO torrenting). The additional/optional bells and whistles we have DO make it more of a privacy suite, but that's only one small part of the big picture.
I'll be swapping from ExpressVPN shortly.
For us, biggest cost (no surprise) is infrastructure and staff, which is split ~50/50. Our ad budget is $0, however the same is not true for the big snakeoil sellers out there. They burn CRAZY cash on ads, which is why the renewal terms in fine print (at least for Nord) would make American telcos salivate with jealousy. "Buy X years for price Y, get Z months free" - you don't get any "free" months (basically a lie), and it renews at 2.5x the price, if you read the fine print.
It's really disgusting.
Mullvad, it performs well and I feel that the ability to pay cash/crypto, the lack of subscription both are tangible signals that they are real about anonymity.
Proton, with their Secure Core features is pretty nifty and I like that they have other products that shoehorn into "getting away from being spied on" by providing mail/calendar/drive storage as an alternative to Google. Their drive product could use some work but overall I'm really happy to pay $10/mo for VPN+custom domain mail+500GB of available cold storage.
Thanks for the background on the industry.
"We store no logs for your privacy", all whole literally storing your entire life under the umbrella of one company. Why not just stick with Google at that point? At least they're a public company and heavily regulated.
You can also import your own WG and OpenVPN configs into the app, and use your own servers and benefit from all of the above mentioned features. Hell, you can even use the app without a WS account, solely for this purpose.
Highly agree with this statement.
That's why from my experience of using PIA, windscribe, keepsolid, Nord and mullvad.
I keep recommending mullvad VPN to collegues, acquittances and online friend (on a down side their IP reputation sucks badly, too much of captchas)
I'd be surprised if this doesn't apply to ALL commercial VPNs.
As soon as a service starts seeing a dozen users from a single IP, they're gonna start throwing CAPTCHAs on them more.
All of this can also be (verifiably) disabled by the end user in the web control panel.
The part that seems shady to me is how you do this without being caught by the up database providers are marked as a non-residential ip.
What steps, if any, are you taking to make sure you are sourcing residential proxies ethically? Honest question.
I thought this kind of thing didn't happen so much with VPNs as their target market is pretty technical and I would expect those people not to fall for 'review' or comparison site scams.
Clearly I was completely wrong. I'm sorry to hear your industry is basically being blackmailed by these scammers (I consider a site pretending to give advice or comparisons but instead offering the highest bidder a total scam)
We did some tests years ago by commenting positive things on "best" VPNs, and negative ones on "not best" ones. These get published every time. Do the same in reverse, only a small fraction gets posted.
Most of these "reviews" are written by SEO blog spammers, as most review sites are owned by marketing agencies or people with marketing backgrounds.
I have no way of knowing with anything approaching confidence which ones are decent and which ones aren't.
Consumer VPN industry is a shit show, especially in the last 3-5 years. The parasitic "VPN review" industry is making all the money, as the "big VPNs" are paying ridiculously high CPA rates (think gambling CPA rates of $50-$100). Most "review" sites rank VPNs based on a single metric - who pays the most. This is why vpnmentor (a review site) was acquired for more money than PrivateInternetAccess (a "major VPN). Hilariously, by the same company, Kape technologies which used used to make adware (as Crossrider), and then decided to go all in on "privacy".
Then there are influencers and Youtubers, all of them peddling VPNs of the highest bidder, reading off a script and making impossible / bullshit claims about capabilities of VPNs. This outright causes harm to the industry.
VPNs that don't participate in these BS schemes (or can't pay $100/signup, and wait for ROI 3 years later), have only 1 way to grow: word of mouth, based on the merits of the product. This is very difficult to do given the massive ad spend of the "big VPNs", and false advertising they engage in.
Don't even get me started on the consolidation.... https://blog.windscribe.com/consolidation-of-the-vpn-industr...