We are intentionally trying to avoid the $10-40/mo "privacy VPN" market. There is endless abuse and pain running it. I've run remailers, talked to FBI agents when they were potentially going to do bad things to me, etc., and am trying to avoid being in that position again. Setting a $100/mo floor pretty much puts us in the business/group range only, which has vastly less abuse.

Within that goal, we're looking at various pricing options, and additional bundled or a la carte services (DLP, logging, backup, etc.). $99/mo is just intended to communicate that if you want a single user VPN to use BitTorrent or IRC, you should look elsewhere. (I'll probably put up some Tor nodes again on separate networks to contribute to the "freedom of information" market)

The CloudFlare analogy is kind of a stretch, but the idea is that they do magic stuff to your front end customer traffic, and we do magic stuff to your back end internal user traffic. They're performance and security (mainly availability, some other security); we're manageability and security.

As for why you'd use a service vs. setting up a server and running it yourself, different users have different internal support costs for different things. I run my own services for some things. I use providers for others. Most businesses are generally happier buying a packaged service vs. paying someone to configure something custom and put it on a server and maintain it. It really depends on the environment.

The TechCrunch folks are very cozy with CloudFlare, so anything even remotely mentioning security also gets a CF plug.

I specifically mentioned CF when talking to the writer, though. (I love the CF product, and thought it would be a good way to explain network services overlaid on top of existing network links and traffic, just internal vs. external)