Kind of interesting idea, but looking at the per gb price, not really sure who this is targeting. 100gb is $4, which is at or more than the monthly price of many vpn companies. So downloading is out of the question, leaving only just web browsing really.
Honestly I feel vpns are just kind of like gym memberships, it's not expected for everyone who gets one to use it every day, even though they could.
Crosseye_Jack 671 days ago [-]
Don't forget the per/hour connected price if you stayed connected 24/7 for 30 days thats $14.40 + BW charges.
The only real use case I can foresee this for is for people who might use a VPN for a few hours, a few times a month. With that kind of usage pattern $10 (The min topup value by the look of it) could last you a fair few months so works out cheaper than some of the other mainstream VPN providers who offer a flat fee service.
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
I like your analogy of gym membership to other VPN providers!
If I may use analogy to describe UpVPN - its like buying Milk - you pay upfront you bring it home consume it and go to grocery store and buy more.
UpVPN is an option in spectrum of VPN providers. Only you can determine based on your usage if this option makes sense for you.
What UpVPN does provide (unlimited devices without subscription and your never expiring balance stays if you come back months later) other providers do not. And vice-versa UpVPN for its pricing model does not provide unlimited usage.
22c 670 days ago [-]
This is the kind of service I would use for travelling (where I'm already on roaming mobile data). I will keep it in mind!
hackan 671 days ago [-]
Yeah, the price is huge! I use terabytes of VPN traffic per month...
WheatMillington 670 days ago [-]
Surely though you realise that's not typical.
FinnKuhn 670 days ago [-]
nor the intended customer base. This seems more for someone who needs to use a VPN occasionally, for example to watch a specific movie or VPN back into their home country while on vacation
KomoD 670 days ago [-]
Even on vacation it could probably be more than a normal 1 month subscription.
FinnKuhn 670 days ago [-]
do you go on vacation every month?
KomoD 670 days ago [-]
I never said so? Just dont pay for more than 1 month lol??
FinnKuhn 670 days ago [-]
Most of them a subscription services though? When you are using little bandwith every now ans then this service could be the better option. Not saying it is better for every use case, but I can see situations where it is more practical and easier to use (no subscriptions to cancel)
AnotherGoodName 671 days ago [-]
For streaming that doesn't get detected as being via a VPN the only successful way i've found is to use a custom VPN server on an IP no service knows as a known VPN.
My home country has TV networks that refuse to work on any of the known VPN providers. They've actually gone to the trouble of IP blocking known exits and the VPNs don't seem to change that often enough.
I know enough to buy a lowendbox and set it up as a VPN and use that and it works (provided the host is oddball enough not to be a known datacenter based IP). But i wonder if the above would work better than the more regular VPN providers.
hnav 670 days ago [-]
Once the OP has ramped up their business, they can have a discounted P2P offering where you use each other as exit nodes.
hk__2 670 days ago [-]
That’s a very dangerous feature: what will happen when someone watch pedoporn using you as an exit node?
lionkor 670 days ago [-]
I've always wondered, is there no burden of proof on the prosecution to prove it was you, especially with a p2p VPN installed?
genocidicbunny 670 days ago [-]
It would be a pyrrhic victory for you even if you prove it wasn't you that was downloading it. Your name is going to be in court documents associated with prosecution over csam or other illegal materials. This information will be easily found. If you're the first case of it's kind, you will also have to deal with whatever tales the media spins about this. If you're somewhere like Florida, you might end up with your photo next to a label of 'pedophile' being plastered publicly.
A lot of people will simply see the headline, assume you're guilty and treat you as such. And a lot of people are willing to treat those they think are pedophiles very very badly (there was a case recently where a murderer serving life in jail killed his pedophile cellmate) Anyone that knows about this incident will probably never allow you to be around kids unattended, regardless of your innocence. You will be a social pariah.
Innocent until proven guilty had to be enshrined in law because most people will treat you guilty until proven innocent, and they don't have much concern about forgetting the 'proven innocent' bit.
So I guess it's time to disconnect from the internet, at least your PC b/c you can't be certain it's not used as a vpn/proxy service through an exploit or rough app.
Syonyk 670 days ago [-]
If you want the "full experience," just set yourself up as a Tor exit node. You'll rapidly find it's impossible to use the internet from the same connection. VPN services are more and more falling into the same category. Even just "cloud provider" IP ranges are broken often enough to be noticeable - I run an Outline VPN on DigitalOcean droplets every now and then, and I've found that that's enough to get me 403'd from a lot of sites.
"Arrest first, deal with nerds protesting their innocence later" still involves getting arrested.
belval 670 days ago [-]
In a perfect world for sure, but in practice if there is any rumor that something as socially toxic as that went through your network, ultimately your reputation is ruined regardless of the legal outcome.
stronglikedan 670 days ago [-]
Not to mention your bank account being ruined by defense attorneys.
spurgu 670 days ago [-]
Would you want to turn over your computer to a forensics expert to prove your innocence?
I would hope that authorities at least would try to build an actual case against you and not just raid your home because of some fraudulent traffic from your IP. I might be too optimistic in that regard.
BLKNSLVR 670 days ago [-]
I can vouch for suspected fraudulent traffic being enough for authorities to warrant a raid.
BolexNOLA 670 days ago [-]
I’m guessing you can’t elaborate lol
BLKNSLVR 670 days ago [-]
I'd like to write up the details sooner rather than later, and I've got pages of notes I've written, but
1: it makes me angry to think about it
2: I have other, positive things I'd rather do
It took them 8 months to return the ~$10k of gear they "stole" from me, and they found nothing.
No apology, no explanation of how I was somehow caught up in their data, just "come collect your stuff".
Ironically, they traumatized my kids (I don't think they even did any background checks on me - I don't believe they even knew there were kids in the house before they barged in).
Luckily my kids are resilient and we can sometimes even joke (bitterly) about it.
spurgu 670 days ago [-]
Oh man, that sounds horrible. Was this in the US?
BLKNSLVR 670 days ago [-]
Australia, so at least we didn't get guns shoved in our faces.
I should also make the point that, with one exception, the officers conducting the raid were polite.
BolexNOLA 670 days ago [-]
Totally understand and my apologies for prying!
BLKNSLVR 670 days ago [-]
All good, I wouldn't have replied if I wasn't up to it.
Don't feel bad for asking.
I do want to "get it out", and one of the things holding me back is "what's the best way of doing it" (along with "what's not going to invite further negative police attention").
Along with a family member, we've approached our local government representative for advice on how to go about pursuing some kind of action that might help "make the system better" to minimise the incidents of innocent parties being subjected to the violence of the state, but it's mostly been a dead end. But I also don't want it to be what defines the rest of my life either, and pursuing this kind of thing could easily end up eating who I am currently (and I'm quite happy with my current self).
I also don't want media attention, really, in any context.
Now I'm mostly just writing this to understand my own motivations...
BolexNOLA 667 days ago [-]
> But I also don't want it to be what defines the rest of my life either, and pursuing this kind of thing could easily end up eating who I am currently (and I'm quite happy with my current self).
I also don't want media attention, really, in any context.
Now I'm mostly just writing this to understand my own motivations...
Man I really feel this part, though admittedly for a shorter-lived and much simpler reason so I don’t want you to think that I think I fully get it.
My wife and I had two officers walk into our apartment when we were a younger couple. Unannounced, 1 or 2am. Just lights shining around and I jumped up looking for a blunt object. They then announced themselves. Mind you we live in an incredibly gun, friendly state, so if they have done this is somebody else, it is incredibly likely they would’ve had a gun drawn on them, and who knows how it would have gone down. They let themselves in because “the door was unlocked and they were looking for someone.” Mind you to get to our apartment wasn’t a simple thing. You had to walk around a gravel parking lot and up these rear steps. We lived above a restaurant and all that jazz.
I didn’t do anything about it after they left. I just kind of wanted to forget the situation and not think about what could have been. Think god I am white and didn’t have a gun on me, I’ll just leave it at that.
We didn’t even talk about it until probably 5 or 6 years later. What you wrote above made me better realize why.
lionkor 670 days ago [-]
That is NOT how burden of proof works
TechBro8615 670 days ago [-]
As long as p2p exit nodes are relatively uncommon, it will be relatively unbelievable for you to claim that "someone else" was doing the illegal things on your network.
But if p2p exit nodes were orders of magnitude more common, then the burden of proof would indisputably be the responsibility of the prosecutors, since anyone could credibly claim "someone else did it."
And that's why this trope of "but what if someone does bad stuff on your network?!" is so frustratingly self-defeating: if everyone just ignored that risk, then everyone could have a p2p exit node, and the risk would be mitigated. It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma where nobody wants to be the early adopter of a system that would, on the whole, benefit all of us.
A society is difficult to surveil when everyone uses Tor as both a client and an exit node, and onion routing is the default method of exchanging packets (some might say it should have been incorporated into the original design of the internet). So it's perhaps worth noting that adversaries of society, such as the NSA or FBI, have a great incentive to perpetuate fearmongering about p2p networks and the threat of "but whatabout muh criminals on muh network!"
If you're reading this, maybe it's time to setup a Tor relay (with config flag `ExitRelay 1`).
genocidicbunny 670 days ago [-]
> But if p2p exit nodes were orders of magnitude more common, then the burden of proof would indisputably be the responsibility of the prosecutors, since anyone could credibly claim "someone else did it."
I think I'm more cynical about our justice system, but the way I see it, this just gives them ammunition to go after anybody on a whim. Simply getting tangled up in the justice system, even if innocent, is an expensive and stressful thing. Most of us do not have the resources to just have a dedicated team of lawyers taking care of everything. So if everyone was running a Tor exit node, and it was known that there was CSAM accessed through some of them, an overzealous prosecutor could probably push through at least a search warrant of your computers because as a Tor exit node runner, there's a reasonable chance that CSAM was accessed via your node. You're not getting your stuff back for a while if that happens.
TechBro8615 670 days ago [-]
I agree, but that's why I labeled it a prisoner's dilemma. If literally everyone ran an exit node, then if prosecutors wanted to assume that any exit node facilitated the transfer of illegal material, then they would need to find other ways of proving criminality other than what packets were sent from your IP address. They can't seize everyone's hardware. If they wanted to obtain a warrant for you, they'd need more probable cause than "he's running an exit node" (because everyone runs an exit node).
As it stands, there's already a certain level of injustice, because corporations like Google and Microsoft facilitate all sorts of illegal communications, and the worst that happens is they get a letter from the feds asking them nicely for their subscriber's information. The investigators don't jump to the conclusion that the CEO of Google is a child predator and seize all the Google servers. But for an independent system admin on a home network, that's exactly what they do, even though there's no fundamental difference other than the size of the operation (and the implicit assumption that exit relays are unusual, which is the unfair assumption I'm trying to draw attention to as an explanation for lack of plausible deniability on the part of the idealistic sysadmin in a world where exit nodes are unusual).
genocidicbunny 670 days ago [-]
> If literally everyone ran an exit node
This is impossible in practice though, so while an interesting thought experiment, it has little bearing on reality. Your local court isn't going to be running a Tor exit node on their systems. Your friendly nearby S&P500 corp isn't going to be running Tor exit nodes on their systems. Your local public library probably won't either.
> They can't seize everyone's hardware.
With your thought experiment, yes, but in practice that's not going to be the case. You're more likely to end up with very selective enforcement instead -- if you run a Tor exit node, the justice system can effectively blackmail you because at the very least they can cause you a very expensive headache. "Shame if we had to get a search warrant to make sure it wasn't you downloading some CSAM"
Legality aside maybe I simply don’t want people using my computer to share images of children
TechBro8615 670 days ago [-]
Would you want to provide infrastructure for Russian and Chinese citizens to access the parts of the internet that are censored by their autocratic regimes? What if the only way to do that also requires incurring a risk that a child predator might use your computer too?
orangea 670 days ago [-]
I have no idea but maybe it would count as aiding and abetting.
lionkor 670 days ago [-]
That's a really good point. It could be claimed that you must have known of the possibility and that you support it, etc
pinkcan 670 days ago [-]
suggest the use of the term Child Sexual Abuse Media - CSAM as it better describes the content and reflects the harm it causes
hk__2 665 days ago [-]
thanks.
codedokode 670 days ago [-]
If "children" make such media themselves, is it still considered an "abuse"?
pinkcan 670 days ago [-]
What are you trying to get at with this question, and how does it matter in the context of this thread?
Are you asking about the consequences of breaking laws while using someone else's internet access as an exit point, or are you asking about the dynamics of CSAM production?
_that comment is giving off really nasty vibes_
geraldyo 670 days ago [-]
Amongst "children", no. If for an adult, yes...
670 days ago [-]
r_lee 670 days ago [-]
This is what the "residential proxies" do. They push out a free VPN or buy out a game in the play/app store and integrate their p2p network on it, so that other people can then use your device as a proxy.
Never ever would you want to pay to do that to yourself lol.
john_minsk 670 days ago [-]
Just a suggestion: drop these providers
lxgr 671 days ago [-]
> Serverless! How? [...] We provision a VPN server on-demand when you connect.
You keep using that word...
quickthrower2 670 days ago [-]
Is it worth dying on the “machine isn’t the server, it is the application that serves” hill or has that shipped sailed in the 90s?
More seriously, serverless has come to really mean “almost fully outsourced ops”. If all you need to do is check logs and your bill, but you can still
run arbitrary code, then it is serverless.
lxgr 670 days ago [-]
> If all you need to do is check logs and your bill, but you can still run arbitrary code, then it is serverless.
It seems like you can't run any code at all on this service, though.
And if the service provider itself uses a serverless model to run their application which provides a service to me... Why do I care, as a customer?
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
I agree its a misnomer, however appropriate to technically describe whats happening in one word.
To me, "serverless" means "you'd normally be setting up a server yourself in some way (whether low-level and manually, or via a standardized VM or container image orchestration solution), but here you don't have to".
As a VPN user (of this type of VPN in any case; corporate VPNs are a different beast), I've never had to set up a server myself – I'm paying to use somebody else's server!
In other words, we also don't call Gmail "serverless".
GordonS 670 days ago [-]
But wouldn't this be more appropriately termed IaaS (infrastructure as a service) than serverless?
koito17 670 days ago [-]
...or "on-demand VPN server" in the case of UpVPN. But none of these alternative names market as well as "Severless", so we're stuck with "Serverless" whether we like it or not.
lxgr 670 days ago [-]
It's just a consumer VPN service... as a service!
Nobody calls Netflix a "serverless VOD platform" either, or Verizon a "serverless wireless carrier".
slim 670 days ago [-]
why is it important to me as a user, that you provision servers on demand ?
caust1c 670 days ago [-]
This couldn't at all be related to the submission 34 days ago talking about building a VPN on Fly.io with Tailscale (or even Headscale) could it?
My take is it's either a very quick copy, or the feds. Perhaps both.
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
None of it is related to the link above.
I love Fly.io - they a building a great product.
The website https://upvpn.app is hosted on Fly.io as identified in the comments below. VPN servers are not hosted on Fly.io
TechBro8615 670 days ago [-]
Not everything is connected to HN's sychophantically favorite buzzwords.
caust1c 670 days ago [-]
Just saying it happens to have come out of nowhere and their locations are suspiciously similar to Fly's regions.
TechBro8615 670 days ago [-]
You'd have to try the service and test the IP addresses to be sure, but yeah maybe it's running on Fly. Or any other cloud network(s) with servers in those locations, which could be any (or multiple) of them - it's a fairly common set of regions.
The reason most cloud providers have overlapping datacenter locations is generally explainable by the fact that they all rent space in the same physical buildings (e.g. an Equinix datacenter), where they peer with each other and classify the building as an "internet exchange point" (IXP). These buildings tend to congregate near each other for historical or geographical reasons, like proximity to the landing terminal of an undersea cable, or inheriting a building from the old DARPA network.
It's actually quite annoying how clouds will label their region e.g. "gcp-eu-1," but it's actually just a reference to some rack space that Google rents in the same London Equinix datacenter as AWS and Azure.
KomoD 670 days ago [-]
Bingo, the website and api itself is hosted on Fly.io at least.
~ ipinfo upvpn.app
- IP 213.188.207.130
- Anycast true
- City Chicago
- Region Illinois
- Country United States (US)
- Currency USD ($)
- Location 41.8500,-87.6500
- Organization AS40509 Fly.io, Inc.
- Postal 60666
- Timezone America/Chicago
caust1c 670 days ago [-]
Even juicier:
15:21:52 $ curl https://upvpn.app/install.sh
#!/bin/sh
# Based on Tailscale: Copyright (c) 2021 Tailscale Inc & AUTHORS All rights reserved.
# Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style
# license that can be found in the LICENSE file.
#
# This script detects the current operating system, and installs
# upvpn on supported OS.
To be clear, I don't mean to disparage upvpn, in fact I'm impressed they pulled it together so quickly.
Just feels crazy to read about it a month ago and see it today, you know?
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
Their installation script is open source and is acknowledged as such.
upvpn is not related to them.
alam2000 669 days ago [-]
[dead]
r_lee 671 days ago [-]
$10 per month
+$0.05 per connection
+$0.02 per hour
+$0.04 per GB (I use about 300 GB)
So in total: $10 + about $12 + $1.5 (30x connections per day)
= $23.5 per month
Mullvad is $5.
Using the big 3 for a VPN is suicide. You do not want to host a business based on bandwidth on those.
A cool tech demo but definitely not viable as a business.
Also, why a California LLC?
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
There is no per-month cost, account is free.
$10 is your starting prepaid balance - that you consume by using UpVPN.
I think honestly you should try to phase out the "per hour" pricing, and just somehow make it so that each connection doesn't need a separate server, as it is just routing in the end, I think it would be easier to market just as a "no BS subscription!" VPN service, which I think could have a market.
As for the California LLC, I just asked because the California LLC is kind of known for being a PITA, with the fees, privacy, etc. and from what I know, you don't actually have one unless you have physical presence, but then there's some tax filing implications if you file in e.g. Delaware or Wyoming so I don't know too well.
GL!
croddin 671 days ago [-]
I read it as $10 is the minimum to add to your account not a monthly fee, so just $13.5 for you and potentially cheaper than mullvad for light users, is that correct?
hnav 670 days ago [-]
Who cares if it's on big 3? If it takes off and they start getting charged 10c/GB, after about 10-20k spend for the month they'll be paying about 5c/GB so close to breaking even. More importantly, at that point they'll have a business with 10s of thousands of revenue which is an opportunity to either
- work on minimizing the cost and carve out a margin
- go to VC and say "hey I have this VPN service, people seem to like it"
jandrese 670 days ago [-]
Because if you come out of their IP space every major website assumes you are a bot and will start slamming you with obnoxious CAPCHAs and sometimes just outright block access.
hnav 670 days ago [-]
Right, and then OP can bring their /24 to AWS or migrate the data plane off onto a less known provider?
packetlost 670 days ago [-]
That's pretty much a given on any VPN service provider though. What's your point?
michaelt 670 days ago [-]
Is there a per-month charge?
I know the pricing page says "Prepaid starting at $10" but isn't that just the minimum top up?
kwanbix 670 days ago [-]
I don't think it is $10 per month. Is whatever you use: $0.05 per connection +$0.02 per hour +$0.04 per GB.
$10 is the minium you can add to your account, and then it deducts from there.
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
This is correct!
There is no per-month cost, opening account is free.
codetrotter 671 days ago [-]
Mullvad is awesome, but it’s not even about the price.
pierat 670 days ago [-]
Bunches I know are fleeing Mullvad due to their 'no port forwarding" policy now in effect.
ProtonVPN still allows forwarding and is what quite a few fellow pie-rats are now using.
Mullvad is dead.
codetrotter 670 days ago [-]
Mullvad has a policy of not keeping logs, and they have gone to extreme lengths to implement the technical side of things to ensure that this really is true.
Other VPN providers claim to not keep logs and you have to take their word for it. But then whoops it turns out they did keep logs after all.
Mullvad is the only VPN provider that puts its money where its mouth is.
Meanwhile ProtonMail was legally forced to reveal one of its users IP logs a few months ago. https://www.privacyaffairs.com/protonmail-surrenders-user-lo... What reason is there to believe that Proton will be in a better position to protect their VPN users, than they were at protecting their Mail users?
protonmail 670 days ago [-]
It's important not to confuse the various Proton services. Proton Mail is considered to be a communication service, and in most countries (including Switzerland), communication services are regulated to some extent. Privacy isn't a blank check to break the law with impunity, and all companies need to comply with the local law.
That being said, Swiss law is very restrictive, and there are a lot of hurdles that one needs to jump through to get a court order. And even with a court order (and has been proved multiple times in court), there is no way to break Proton Mail's encryption. Privacy is not the same as anonymity, and due to the way the internet works, if anonymity is what you are going after, you have to exercise proper infosec and take preventive measures, such as using Tor or VPN.
Under Swiss law, the treatment of VPNs is different. So VPNs can indeed be no-logs. No-logs VPN, is also possible in other countries as well. What makes Switzerland different, and possibly unique, is that within the current Swiss legal framework, Proton VPN also does not have forced logging obligations. So, a no-logs US VPN could for instance, get a NSL (National Security Letter) to start logging particular users, but that's not possible in Switzerland. In addition to that, VPN is mostly impossible for law enforcement to ask for something reasonable, as there's no "identity" for the traffic going out of our server. There's practically no chance of law enforcement to know what account to ask for.
Finally, it's worth noting that in October 2021 (after the case you mentioned), Proton won in court against the Swiss government and as a result, email services cannot be considered telecommunications providers, and consequently are not subject to the data retention requirements imposed on telecommunications providers. You can find more details here: https://proton.me/blog/court-strengthens-email-privacy.
r_lee 670 days ago [-]
If that ruling were to be overturned, would Proton be open to integrating the VPN service in a way that people who access Protonmail from the clearnet would be tunneled in some way? Or some kind of mode where it would reject any logins unless coming from the Proton VPN ASN etc?
r_lee 670 days ago [-]
From what Proton has said, it seems like the Swiss courts allow the authorities to compel email service providers like Proton to log IPs for them, but they've also said that they can't do that for VPNs, I don't know if the situation has changed but I remember them saying that.
water9 671 days ago [-]
Because paying taxes is fun
hackan 671 days ago [-]
Pretty neat idea, but it leaks DNS requests unfortunately: see point 5 "When We Share Information" in [privacy policy](https://upvpn.app/privacy-policy/).
If they used some sort of disposable or "trustable" DNS server, it would be awesome!
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
If you use the UpVPN app it configures DNS=1.1.1.1 and not configurable yet.
However, when you use Web Devices, a configuration file or QR code is generated with DNS=1.1.1.1 but you can change it before using.
hackan 661 days ago [-]
great tip, although this situation should be way clearer than it is...
crisopolis 671 days ago [-]
Interesting, if they were going to provision a disposable vpn, couldn't they have done the same with the DNS.
beardog 671 days ago [-]
>We provision a VPN server on-demand when you connect.
>We deprovision it when you disconnect.
Do you still share an IP address with the other users? One of the main ways a VPN grants privacy is because everyone shares a handful of IPs. There is still demand for dedicated IPs though, because they trigger blocking less.
I have a need for a good "residential"/"mobile" proxy/VPN service, but I have yet to see a company that I was confident that they were ethically sourcing the servers.
KomoD 670 days ago [-]
> I have a need for a good "residential"/"mobile" proxy/VPN service, but I have yet to see a company that I was confident that they were ethically sourcing the servers.
If your willing to manage/self-host it yourself, some ISPs do provide hosting as well, my old ISP provides a VPS at ~$10/mo with a completely clean IP identical to their broadband customers.
greygh0st 670 days ago [-]
[flagged]
KomoD 670 days ago [-]
Your minimum purchase is 5
Your discord is full of people complaining that the service is down, that they haven't received the proxies or that you aren't responding to support tickets.
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
Yes IP address is shared with other users - by pooling users on single server.
However, if you find provisioning time to be greater than few seconds then its a good assumption that you're the only one using the server.
alam2000 670 days ago [-]
[dead]
shortcake27 670 days ago [-]
This is unrelated to the product, but I’m on mobile and I can see your website is using a full-height scrollable container instead of allowing the document to scroll naturally. This causes buggy scrolling and prevents default browser behaviour - the address bar doesn’t collapse and tapping the top of the screen doesn’t scroll to the top of the document.
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
Thank you for the feedback!
danpalmer 670 days ago [-]
I feel like this needs a pricing calculator. 3 different pricing axes makes it really hard to know how much you'll use.
Perhaps you could present some common use-cases with example prices?
If you're avoiding doing that because it should show the pricing to be too high, then perhaps that's something that needs to be worked on. In general pay-as-you-go pricing should be lower for the same outcome than the all-you-can-eat version of the same thing, because you should be able to not pay for the downtime.
convalescindrey 670 days ago [-]
> In general pay-as-you-go pricing should be lower for the same outcome than the all-you-can-eat version of the same thing, because you should be able to not pay for the downtime.
Could you clarify why this should be true? In the long run, given the costs are the same, then the income of the company also needs to be the same. This means that on average you'd pay the same. Some power-users would pay more with pay-as-you-go, some rarely-users would pay less, since they are cross-subsidizing the power-users in subscription models.
I can imagine some dynamics caused by power-users avoiding pay-as-you-go plans, so subscription plans see different usage patterns. But it's not at all obvious to me why this should be cheaper. On the contrary, all those on-demand resources need to exist and there needs to be infra for spin up/down etc, so I'd actually expect higher pricing.
danpalmer 670 days ago [-]
From the customer perspective there needs to be an advantage to paying by usage. The reason PAYG phone plans exist is to appeal to those who don't need or want everything a monthly contract provides, particularly for budget conscious users.
Contracts/bundles/etc appear to charge less because they bundle together things on the assumption that consumption will follow a predictable distribution, however they are actually a mechanism for raising average selling price by giving people more than they need/want/use and charging them more for it.
They build in a margin on top of the average, or somewhere above it on that curve. This means the average user is likely paying more than for their share of usage. Sure, from the company's perspective they have to keep the resources around, but that's a scaling and cost-base issue for the company, not the concern of the user, and if the company scales well it shouldn't be much of an issue.
Ultimately with this service, the competition is $5/m for effectively unlimited usage. If this service costs the average user $10/m, then only a small fraction at the bottom end of the usage distribution are going to make a saving, and find it a compelling offering, all things being equal in terms of product quality etc.
This doesn't apply to everything of course, different industries, product categories, etc, are priced in different ways and have different customer expectations, but it's common and I think it applies here.
convalescindrey 670 days ago [-]
This is a reasonable argument to make if the usage is fixed. But it is not. Depending on which price plan you have, your usage will differ. If it's unlimited anyway, well let me just leave that video running even when I'm in the shower and don't see it. Let me just download this large file again, it's for free anyway, no need to store it. Let me just watch this movie even though I know I'll fall asleep in 5 minutes. Once you PAYG, your usage pattern changes. You wouldn't do the same "wasteful" pattern as with the flat pricing since you are concious that you pay every second/kilobyte/meter of it.
This dynamic is pretty complex and it's not at all clear that your argument holds even with the dynamic considered.
If you translate this site & product into Russian, Farsi and Chinese and accept crypto, you're going to a make a lot of money. Those countries activity block the well known commercial VPNs and I'm sure others.
rvwaveren 670 days ago [-]
I think a lot of people are getting tired of subscriptions everywhere. For the average user, it's not possible to spin up a VPN because of lack of technical knowledge. So, if you are an infrequent VPN user and hate subscriptions, this could be a nice service.
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
I get your "tired of subscription" sentiment, it resonates with lot of us for certain products.
Even if someone can spin up VPN server, UpVPN makes it much much quicker and hassle free to do it with one click or one cli command.
dns_snek 670 days ago [-]
Who is this for, exactly? The only way this makes sense, in my eyes, is if you're:
1. Someone who uses VPN very infrequently, likely a couple of times per year while using less than 500GB of traffic, and
2. Someone who doesn't use a VPN to bypass georestrictions, excluding most travelers, and
3. Someone who doesn't mind being classified as a bot
That must be an extremely tiny group of people, right?
Pricing is outrageous for daily VPN users, while your use of datacenter IPs means it's going to be almost useless for evading georestrictions.
Besides, I'm struggling to wrap my head around the concept of a "serverless VPNs". If you're actually spinning up a VPS for each customer then that seems like a very wasteful use of resources for no reason.
boomskats 670 days ago [-]
I know you're taking a lot of shit from everyone else on this thread, but you should know that your landing page and onboarding experience are absolutely flawless, and that you've just made at least $10.
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
Thank you! This is my favorite comment. I love your support!
Taking any feedback and criticism is part of being on Hacker News.
cpursley 670 days ago [-]
Just signed up after spending all day messing with self-hosted Algo & OpenVPN. A real shut up and take my money moment.
Very slow and actually quite expensive. However, works well with Wireguard app on iOS!
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
Thank you for your feedback.
Your comment beautifully describes why upvpn exists:
It saves you time and makes it hassle free if you're setting up VPN servers.
heipei 670 days ago [-]
The fact that they have "Falkenstein" as one of the German locations already tells me they're gonna be using Hetzner VPS to provision the VM :P
KomoD 670 days ago [-]
Minimum charge, billed by hour and bandwidth, no mention of what provider the ips belong to, no bueno for me.
I'd rather just use Mullvad for €5/mo.
12 hours of average usage for me would cost $4
Also: you say "when you end your VPN session, we promptly delete the record from our database that links your session to the specific cloud server", does it also get deleted from the database backups? (assuming you do any)
vpnuser 670 days ago [-]
Interesting - but expensive and limited! This seems to just be a different take on the company that did it first called ValeVPN.com - except they give you unlimited options and also multi-protocols and configuration options - and they work in all the clouds... So how is this better? It is more expensive and more limited? I like the design though...
Michmoor84 670 days ago [-]
I don't see the freakin' difference between buying credits or getting a subscription for a VPN. But here's the deal: a subscription seems more damn convenient 'cause you know the exact sum of cash you're gonna shell out, no surprises there. With their fancy credit system, who knows how much extra they'll squeeze outta you? It's like they're playing games with your wallet. I ain't into that. Keep it simple, keep it transparent. That's how I roll.
maxbutler1 670 days ago [-]
True, the design of UpVPN is quite nice! But JUST the design)
The privacy policy of UpVPN worries me.... Although they assert that protecting user privacy and data is a TOP priority, their logging procedures and data retention guidelines raise some red flags.
By the way, I highly recommend ValeVPN, which you used as an example, to anyone looking for a trusted VPN service to protect their privacy and improve their online experience. I've been a subscriber for over 4 months now, so I checked it out by myself!
Michmoor84 670 days ago [-]
Agree. Also, I don't see the freakin' difference between buying credits or getting a subscription for a VPN. But here's the deal: a subscription seems more damn convenient 'cause you know the exact sum of cash you're gonna shell out, no surprises there. With their fancy credit system, who knows how much extra they'll squeeze outta you? It's like they're playing games with your wallet. I ain't into that. Keep it simple, keep it transparent. That's how I roll.
JoBarrel97 670 days ago [-]
Are you able to unlock different geo-restricted services with it?
newhallsam 670 days ago [-]
Well, it doesn't really seem like it's any better. It's just another company trying to make a buck without really offering anything special. They might have a fancy design, but when it comes down to it, they don't seem to bring anything new or exciting to the table.
JoBarrel97 670 days ago [-]
How long have you been rockin' ValeVPN? I spotted it somewhere too, and it seemed pretty promising with its dedicated server concept. So, is it living up to the hype? I'm curious to know if it's good enough. Share your thoughts
Ameliatay32 670 days ago [-]
I get where you're coming from, but honestly, it feels like VPNs these days are just copying each other. They claim to offer something unique, but in the end, it's all about making money off users.
670 days ago [-]
670 days ago [-]
huhtenberg 670 days ago [-]
This sure reads like a botnet being resold as a VPN service.
In other words, the pitch is suspiciously light on details that actually matter to back their "serverless" claim. The only technical way to parse "serverless" is that their exit nodes are spread over end-user devices. So how did they end up there?
jandrese 670 days ago [-]
$10/month is already double what most unlimited VPN providers charge, and then you're putting bandwidth and time costs on top of that? Even worse, for the ultra-premium price you are getting...an AWS IP address. So enjoy your CAPCHAs and service denials from bot detectors.
avarun 670 days ago [-]
It doesn't seem to be per-month. It's just $10 to open an account.
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
Opening account is free. There is no per-month cost.
$10 is a prepaid balance you start with (which never expires) and consume by using UpVPN. One you run out of balance say few months down the line - you purchase again.
KomoD 670 days ago [-]
Trying to open an account sent me to a stripe invoice.
jandrese 670 days ago [-]
It is very confusing on the website.
gigapotential 670 days ago [-]
Thank you for your feedback, making a note to improve it.
nojvek 670 days ago [-]
I love the no subscription, pay as you go pricing model. Is it a bit expensive than a full month for other providers? yes. I wish they made the data pricing cheaper or included in bundle. Quite hefty if you want to stream a show while roaming.
chrisallick 670 days ago [-]
Does it work on airplanes and websites that actively detect/deny vpn servers? any ad block features?
vbezhenar 671 days ago [-]
Just write simple script. Why this service is needed. Provisioning VPN server is not a rocket science.
notavalleyman 671 days ago [-]
I really thought this was a reference to the dropbox showhn - "you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially"
But in this case it actually is a onliner to spin up a VPN and the relevant mobile/PC client apps are already there.
One click deploy scripts are available for digital ocean, AWS, GCP, Azure etc.
This OG Dropbox comment was too snarky, for a genuine use case, the solutions in those comments were actually complicated than using Dropbox, while spinning up your own VPN is actually safer and better wrt streaming services etc, not easy but serves the purpose in a safer and better way.
quickthrower2 670 days ago [-]
There are plenty of VPN users “intersect” never used the command line.
And maybe a smaller set like me who are geeks but prefer not to manage their own server even from a script. As if using such a script means no problems and you wont be googling for why x y or z isn’t working.
xen2xen1 670 days ago [-]
Mad haxorz skill?!?! I'm leet!
670 days ago [-]
hfkwer 670 days ago [-]
The ip space is what's valuable about a vpn service.
cpursley 670 days ago [-]
Yeah, soooo simple. I've spent the entire day trying to figure out how to run Algo and OpenVPN on DigitalOcean. With zero luck
Some of just don't like screwing with servers and are willing to pay a premium for that. I absolutly loathe managing servers.
mirchiseth 670 days ago [-]
I used to do Algo with a VM on GCP. But fly.io and tailscale has made this really simple. Try this if you are looking for an easier alternative https://github.com/patte/fly-tailscale-exit
cpursley 670 days ago [-]
Thanks, can I use this like a regular personal VPN - hook up my phones, machines and route through it?
throwawaymobule 669 days ago [-]
surprised nobody's made a vpn app that just does that provisioning on demand on some service, optionally using the developer's affilliate code.
671 days ago [-]
stainablesteel 670 days ago [-]
so now the log policy is up to whoever owns whatever server they use?
hank_z 670 days ago [-]
Curious to know how long this VPN can survive in China
Honestly I feel vpns are just kind of like gym memberships, it's not expected for everyone who gets one to use it every day, even though they could.
The only real use case I can foresee this for is for people who might use a VPN for a few hours, a few times a month. With that kind of usage pattern $10 (The min topup value by the look of it) could last you a fair few months so works out cheaper than some of the other mainstream VPN providers who offer a flat fee service.
If I may use analogy to describe UpVPN - its like buying Milk - you pay upfront you bring it home consume it and go to grocery store and buy more.
UpVPN is an option in spectrum of VPN providers. Only you can determine based on your usage if this option makes sense for you.
What UpVPN does provide (unlimited devices without subscription and your never expiring balance stays if you come back months later) other providers do not. And vice-versa UpVPN for its pricing model does not provide unlimited usage.
My home country has TV networks that refuse to work on any of the known VPN providers. They've actually gone to the trouble of IP blocking known exits and the VPNs don't seem to change that often enough.
I know enough to buy a lowendbox and set it up as a VPN and use that and it works (provided the host is oddball enough not to be a known datacenter based IP). But i wonder if the above would work better than the more regular VPN providers.
A lot of people will simply see the headline, assume you're guilty and treat you as such. And a lot of people are willing to treat those they think are pedophiles very very badly (there was a case recently where a murderer serving life in jail killed his pedophile cellmate) Anyone that knows about this incident will probably never allow you to be around kids unattended, regardless of your innocence. You will be a social pariah.
Innocent until proven guilty had to be enshrined in law because most people will treat you guilty until proven innocent, and they don't have much concern about forgetting the 'proven innocent' bit.
"Arrest first, deal with nerds protesting their innocence later" still involves getting arrested.
I would hope that authorities at least would try to build an actual case against you and not just raid your home because of some fraudulent traffic from your IP. I might be too optimistic in that regard.
1: it makes me angry to think about it
2: I have other, positive things I'd rather do
It took them 8 months to return the ~$10k of gear they "stole" from me, and they found nothing.
No apology, no explanation of how I was somehow caught up in their data, just "come collect your stuff".
Ironically, they traumatized my kids (I don't think they even did any background checks on me - I don't believe they even knew there were kids in the house before they barged in).
Luckily my kids are resilient and we can sometimes even joke (bitterly) about it.
I should also make the point that, with one exception, the officers conducting the raid were polite.
Don't feel bad for asking.
I do want to "get it out", and one of the things holding me back is "what's the best way of doing it" (along with "what's not going to invite further negative police attention").
Along with a family member, we've approached our local government representative for advice on how to go about pursuing some kind of action that might help "make the system better" to minimise the incidents of innocent parties being subjected to the violence of the state, but it's mostly been a dead end. But I also don't want it to be what defines the rest of my life either, and pursuing this kind of thing could easily end up eating who I am currently (and I'm quite happy with my current self).
I also don't want media attention, really, in any context.
Now I'm mostly just writing this to understand my own motivations...
Man I really feel this part, though admittedly for a shorter-lived and much simpler reason so I don’t want you to think that I think I fully get it.
My wife and I had two officers walk into our apartment when we were a younger couple. Unannounced, 1 or 2am. Just lights shining around and I jumped up looking for a blunt object. They then announced themselves. Mind you we live in an incredibly gun, friendly state, so if they have done this is somebody else, it is incredibly likely they would’ve had a gun drawn on them, and who knows how it would have gone down. They let themselves in because “the door was unlocked and they were looking for someone.” Mind you to get to our apartment wasn’t a simple thing. You had to walk around a gravel parking lot and up these rear steps. We lived above a restaurant and all that jazz.
I didn’t do anything about it after they left. I just kind of wanted to forget the situation and not think about what could have been. Think god I am white and didn’t have a gun on me, I’ll just leave it at that.
We didn’t even talk about it until probably 5 or 6 years later. What you wrote above made me better realize why.
But if p2p exit nodes were orders of magnitude more common, then the burden of proof would indisputably be the responsibility of the prosecutors, since anyone could credibly claim "someone else did it."
And that's why this trope of "but what if someone does bad stuff on your network?!" is so frustratingly self-defeating: if everyone just ignored that risk, then everyone could have a p2p exit node, and the risk would be mitigated. It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma where nobody wants to be the early adopter of a system that would, on the whole, benefit all of us.
A society is difficult to surveil when everyone uses Tor as both a client and an exit node, and onion routing is the default method of exchanging packets (some might say it should have been incorporated into the original design of the internet). So it's perhaps worth noting that adversaries of society, such as the NSA or FBI, have a great incentive to perpetuate fearmongering about p2p networks and the threat of "but whatabout muh criminals on muh network!"
If you're reading this, maybe it's time to setup a Tor relay (with config flag `ExitRelay 1`).
I think I'm more cynical about our justice system, but the way I see it, this just gives them ammunition to go after anybody on a whim. Simply getting tangled up in the justice system, even if innocent, is an expensive and stressful thing. Most of us do not have the resources to just have a dedicated team of lawyers taking care of everything. So if everyone was running a Tor exit node, and it was known that there was CSAM accessed through some of them, an overzealous prosecutor could probably push through at least a search warrant of your computers because as a Tor exit node runner, there's a reasonable chance that CSAM was accessed via your node. You're not getting your stuff back for a while if that happens.
As it stands, there's already a certain level of injustice, because corporations like Google and Microsoft facilitate all sorts of illegal communications, and the worst that happens is they get a letter from the feds asking them nicely for their subscriber's information. The investigators don't jump to the conclusion that the CEO of Google is a child predator and seize all the Google servers. But for an independent system admin on a home network, that's exactly what they do, even though there's no fundamental difference other than the size of the operation (and the implicit assumption that exit relays are unusual, which is the unfair assumption I'm trying to draw attention to as an explanation for lack of plausible deniability on the part of the idealistic sysadmin in a world where exit nodes are unusual).
This is impossible in practice though, so while an interesting thought experiment, it has little bearing on reality. Your local court isn't going to be running a Tor exit node on their systems. Your friendly nearby S&P500 corp isn't going to be running Tor exit nodes on their systems. Your local public library probably won't either.
> They can't seize everyone's hardware.
With your thought experiment, yes, but in practice that's not going to be the case. You're more likely to end up with very selective enforcement instead -- if you run a Tor exit node, the justice system can effectively blackmail you because at the very least they can cause you a very expensive headache. "Shame if we had to get a search warrant to make sure it wasn't you downloading some CSAM"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Freedom_Project
https://github.com/LibraryFreedom/tor-exit-package/blob/mast...
Are you asking about the consequences of breaking laws while using someone else's internet access as an exit point, or are you asking about the dynamics of CSAM production?
_that comment is giving off really nasty vibes_
Never ever would you want to pay to do that to yourself lol.
You keep using that word...
More seriously, serverless has come to really mean “almost fully outsourced ops”. If all you need to do is check logs and your bill, but you can still run arbitrary code, then it is serverless.
It seems like you can't run any code at all on this service, though.
And if the service provider itself uses a serverless model to run their application which provides a service to me... Why do I care, as a customer?
Its a computing model people recognize .. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serverless_computing
To me, "serverless" means "you'd normally be setting up a server yourself in some way (whether low-level and manually, or via a standardized VM or container image orchestration solution), but here you don't have to".
As a VPN user (of this type of VPN in any case; corporate VPNs are a different beast), I've never had to set up a server myself – I'm paying to use somebody else's server!
In other words, we also don't call Gmail "serverless".
Nobody calls Netflix a "serverless VOD platform" either, or Verizon a "serverless wireless carrier".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36064305
My take is it's either a very quick copy, or the feds. Perhaps both.
I love Fly.io - they a building a great product.
The website https://upvpn.app is hosted on Fly.io as identified in the comments below. VPN servers are not hosted on Fly.io
The reason most cloud providers have overlapping datacenter locations is generally explainable by the fact that they all rent space in the same physical buildings (e.g. an Equinix datacenter), where they peer with each other and classify the building as an "internet exchange point" (IXP). These buildings tend to congregate near each other for historical or geographical reasons, like proximity to the landing terminal of an undersea cable, or inheriting a building from the old DARPA network.
It's actually quite annoying how clouds will label their region e.g. "gcp-eu-1," but it's actually just a reference to some rack space that Google rents in the same London Equinix datacenter as AWS and Azure.
- Anycast true
- City Chicago
- Region Illinois
- Country United States (US)
- Currency USD ($)
- Location 41.8500,-87.6500
- Organization AS40509 Fly.io, Inc.
- Postal 60666
- Timezone America/Chicago
Just feels crazy to read about it a month ago and see it today, you know?
upvpn is not related to them.
So in total: $10 + about $12 + $1.5 (30x connections per day) = $23.5 per month
Mullvad is $5.
Using the big 3 for a VPN is suicide. You do not want to host a business based on bandwidth on those.
A cool tech demo but definitely not viable as a business.
Also, why a California LLC?
$10 is your starting prepaid balance - that you consume by using UpVPN.
California LLC because I'm a resident.
For pricing I describe more in detail in these comments: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36512794 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36513552 -
I think honestly you should try to phase out the "per hour" pricing, and just somehow make it so that each connection doesn't need a separate server, as it is just routing in the end, I think it would be easier to market just as a "no BS subscription!" VPN service, which I think could have a market.
As for the California LLC, I just asked because the California LLC is kind of known for being a PITA, with the fees, privacy, etc. and from what I know, you don't actually have one unless you have physical presence, but then there's some tax filing implications if you file in e.g. Delaware or Wyoming so I don't know too well.
GL!
- work on minimizing the cost and carve out a margin
- go to VC and say "hey I have this VPN service, people seem to like it"
I know the pricing page says "Prepaid starting at $10" but isn't that just the minimum top up?
$10 is the minium you can add to your account, and then it deducts from there.
There is no per-month cost, opening account is free.
ProtonVPN still allows forwarding and is what quite a few fellow pie-rats are now using.
Mullvad is dead.
Other VPN providers claim to not keep logs and you have to take their word for it. But then whoops it turns out they did keep logs after all.
Mullvad is the only VPN provider that puts its money where its mouth is.
Swedish police recently tried to raid Mullvad, but the tech ensured there were no logs for them to take https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/21/23692580/mullvad-vpn-raid...
Meanwhile ProtonMail was legally forced to reveal one of its users IP logs a few months ago. https://www.privacyaffairs.com/protonmail-surrenders-user-lo... What reason is there to believe that Proton will be in a better position to protect their VPN users, than they were at protecting their Mail users?
That being said, Swiss law is very restrictive, and there are a lot of hurdles that one needs to jump through to get a court order. And even with a court order (and has been proved multiple times in court), there is no way to break Proton Mail's encryption. Privacy is not the same as anonymity, and due to the way the internet works, if anonymity is what you are going after, you have to exercise proper infosec and take preventive measures, such as using Tor or VPN.
Under Swiss law, the treatment of VPNs is different. So VPNs can indeed be no-logs. No-logs VPN, is also possible in other countries as well. What makes Switzerland different, and possibly unique, is that within the current Swiss legal framework, Proton VPN also does not have forced logging obligations. So, a no-logs US VPN could for instance, get a NSL (National Security Letter) to start logging particular users, but that's not possible in Switzerland. In addition to that, VPN is mostly impossible for law enforcement to ask for something reasonable, as there's no "identity" for the traffic going out of our server. There's practically no chance of law enforcement to know what account to ask for.
Finally, it's worth noting that in October 2021 (after the case you mentioned), Proton won in court against the Swiss government and as a result, email services cannot be considered telecommunications providers, and consequently are not subject to the data retention requirements imposed on telecommunications providers. You can find more details here: https://proton.me/blog/court-strengthens-email-privacy.
If they used some sort of disposable or "trustable" DNS server, it would be awesome!
However, when you use Web Devices, a configuration file or QR code is generated with DNS=1.1.1.1 but you can change it before using.
Do you still share an IP address with the other users? One of the main ways a VPN grants privacy is because everyone shares a handful of IPs. There is still demand for dedicated IPs though, because they trigger blocking less.
I have a need for a good "residential"/"mobile" proxy/VPN service, but I have yet to see a company that I was confident that they were ethically sourcing the servers.
If your willing to manage/self-host it yourself, some ISPs do provide hosting as well, my old ISP provides a VPS at ~$10/mo with a completely clean IP identical to their broadband customers.
Your discord is full of people complaining that the service is down, that they haven't received the proxies or that you aren't responding to support tickets.
Perhaps you could present some common use-cases with example prices?
If you're avoiding doing that because it should show the pricing to be too high, then perhaps that's something that needs to be worked on. In general pay-as-you-go pricing should be lower for the same outcome than the all-you-can-eat version of the same thing, because you should be able to not pay for the downtime.
Could you clarify why this should be true? In the long run, given the costs are the same, then the income of the company also needs to be the same. This means that on average you'd pay the same. Some power-users would pay more with pay-as-you-go, some rarely-users would pay less, since they are cross-subsidizing the power-users in subscription models.
I can imagine some dynamics caused by power-users avoiding pay-as-you-go plans, so subscription plans see different usage patterns. But it's not at all obvious to me why this should be cheaper. On the contrary, all those on-demand resources need to exist and there needs to be infra for spin up/down etc, so I'd actually expect higher pricing.
Contracts/bundles/etc appear to charge less because they bundle together things on the assumption that consumption will follow a predictable distribution, however they are actually a mechanism for raising average selling price by giving people more than they need/want/use and charging them more for it.
They build in a margin on top of the average, or somewhere above it on that curve. This means the average user is likely paying more than for their share of usage. Sure, from the company's perspective they have to keep the resources around, but that's a scaling and cost-base issue for the company, not the concern of the user, and if the company scales well it shouldn't be much of an issue.
Ultimately with this service, the competition is $5/m for effectively unlimited usage. If this service costs the average user $10/m, then only a small fraction at the bottom end of the usage distribution are going to make a saving, and find it a compelling offering, all things being equal in terms of product quality etc.
This doesn't apply to everything of course, different industries, product categories, etc, are priced in different ways and have different customer expectations, but it's common and I think it applies here.
This dynamic is pretty complex and it's not at all clear that your argument holds even with the dynamic considered.
As of now, The pricing section on FAQ page provides examples of pricing https://upvpn.app/faq/#pricing
Moreover, If you like to see it visually the first picture of dashboard on landing page https://upvpn.app showcase real usage and real charges.
I provided addition info on pricing model here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36512794
Even if someone can spin up VPN server, UpVPN makes it much much quicker and hassle free to do it with one click or one cli command.
1. Someone who uses VPN very infrequently, likely a couple of times per year while using less than 500GB of traffic, and
2. Someone who doesn't use a VPN to bypass georestrictions, excluding most travelers, and
3. Someone who doesn't mind being classified as a bot
That must be an extremely tiny group of people, right?
Pricing is outrageous for daily VPN users, while your use of datacenter IPs means it's going to be almost useless for evading georestrictions.
Besides, I'm struggling to wrap my head around the concept of a "serverless VPNs". If you're actually spinning up a VPS for each customer then that seems like a very wasteful use of resources for no reason.
Taking any feedback and criticism is part of being on Hacker News.
Very slow and actually quite expensive. However, works well with Wireguard app on iOS!
Your comment beautifully describes why upvpn exists: It saves you time and makes it hassle free if you're setting up VPN servers.
I'd rather just use Mullvad for €5/mo.
12 hours of average usage for me would cost $4
Also: you say "when you end your VPN session, we promptly delete the record from our database that links your session to the specific cloud server", does it also get deleted from the database backups? (assuming you do any)
The privacy policy of UpVPN worries me.... Although they assert that protecting user privacy and data is a TOP priority, their logging procedures and data retention guidelines raise some red flags.
By the way, I highly recommend ValeVPN, which you used as an example, to anyone looking for a trusted VPN service to protect their privacy and improve their online experience. I've been a subscriber for over 4 months now, so I checked it out by myself!
In other words, the pitch is suspiciously light on details that actually matter to back their "serverless" claim. The only technical way to parse "serverless" is that their exit nodes are spread over end-user devices. So how did they end up there?
$10 is a prepaid balance you start with (which never expires) and consume by using UpVPN. One you run out of balance say few months down the line - you purchase again.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
And maybe a smaller set like me who are geeks but prefer not to manage their own server even from a script. As if using such a script means no problems and you wont be googling for why x y or z isn’t working.
Some of just don't like screwing with servers and are willing to pay a premium for that. I absolutly loathe managing servers.