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Show HN: Serverless VPN, pay as you go, unlimited devices, no subscriptions

by gigapotential on 6/28/23, 6:43 PM with 139 comments

  • by ApolloFortyNine on 6/28/23, 7:32 PM

    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.

  • by AnotherGoodName on 6/28/23, 8:07 PM

    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.

  • by lxgr on 6/28/23, 7:36 PM

    > Serverless! How? [...] We provision a VPN server on-demand when you connect.

    You keep using that word...

  • by caust1c on 6/28/23, 9:30 PM

    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?

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36064305

    My take is it's either a very quick copy, or the feds. Perhaps both.

  • by r_lee on 6/28/23, 7:53 PM

    $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?

  • by hackan on 6/28/23, 7:37 PM

    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!

  • by beardog on 6/28/23, 7:45 PM

    >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.

  • by shortcake27 on 6/28/23, 9:34 PM

    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.
  • by danpalmer on 6/28/23, 8:42 PM

    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.

  • by cpursley on 6/28/23, 10:15 PM

    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.
  • by rvwaveren on 6/28/23, 9:06 PM

    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.
  • by dns_snek on 6/28/23, 10:40 PM

    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.

  • by boomskats on 6/28/23, 8:35 PM

    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.
  • by cpursley on 6/28/23, 9:59 PM

    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!

  • by heipei on 6/28/23, 8:42 PM

    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
  • by KomoD on 6/28/23, 8:51 PM

    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)

  • by vpnuser on 6/29/23, 12:47 PM

    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...
  • by huhtenberg on 6/28/23, 10:11 PM

    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?

  • by jandrese on 6/28/23, 8:11 PM

    $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.
  • by nojvek on 6/29/23, 5:14 PM

    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.
  • by chrisallick on 6/28/23, 9:16 PM

    Does it work on airplanes and websites that actively detect/deny vpn servers? any ad block features?
  • by vbezhenar on 6/28/23, 7:51 PM

    Just write simple script. Why this service is needed. Provisioning VPN server is not a rocket science.
  • by stainablesteel on 6/28/23, 8:52 PM

    so now the log policy is up to whoever owns whatever server they use?
  • by hank_z on 6/28/23, 11:21 PM

    Curious to know how long this VPN can survive in China
  • by lost_tourist on 6/28/23, 9:43 PM

    How can I pay with this with cash via snail mail?
  • by jrhizor on 6/28/23, 8:43 PM

    seems very expensive