8 ms·

WeVPN Is Shutting Down

74 points by askura 4y ago

fuddle 4y ago
I did wonder how WeVPN were offering such low prices compared to all other VPN providers. e.g a 2-Year subscription @ $2.59 per month
askura 4y ago
Another VPN service bites it.
mardifoufs 4y ago
It's weird because the VPN industry is usually portrayed as having high margins (and it makes sense, considering how much money is spent on marketing by various VPN services). Is it a case of "winners take all", with smaller players having little revenue and profit? But then again, everyone seems to offer their own vpn now (adguard, blokada, protonmail, etc). Is it just profitable if you offer a bare minimum, almost white labeled service? (I guess I have always wondered how and why VPN offering seem to have exploded recently, and how tons of them seem to be able to afford lavish ad spend even with little VC money)
- askura 4y ago
  I'm seeing it more going the other way. Over the past few years so many services have been bought by bigger corps or even media companies. These bigger companies seem to be able to undercut the competition. Causing things like this I guess. Though it's anyone's guess what has happened as service over time had deteriorated quite drastically.
- leros 4y ago
  The barrier to entry is also pretty low. It's basically a marketing game to see who can attract customers at the best rate of return. I'm guessing there are tons of VPN startups that never get large enough to keep going and the ones that do grow probably get acquired by the bigger ones.
  - askura 4y ago
    Yeah seems to be the case. Express VPN's parent corp acquired CyberGhost, Zenmate, Private Internet access over the last few years. They also paid as much as several of these put together for the marketing/affiliate websites Webselence, VPNmentor, Safety Detectives. Which shows how much money must be in these affiliate programs.
- meltedcapacitor 4y ago
  Sounds like a hard business for small VPN providers, getting squeezed between the cat and mouse game with content providers blocking them on one side, and users abusing the service on the other side. Same work whatever size, so better be big, or white label a big name.
  - codexon 4y ago
    What work do VPN providers do get themselves unblocked?
    - CharlesW 4y ago
      Sketchy VPN providers use botnet services like Mylobot to provide residential exit nodes. https://www.bitsight.com/blog/mylobot-investigating-proxy-botnet https://www.bitsight.com/blog/mylobot-investigating-proxy-bo...
      - codexon 3y ago
        I'm talking about the mainstream ones like nordvpn and mulvad.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- majormajor 4y ago
  Those marketing costs need to be included in the margins - put concretely, it means cost of customer acquisition is very high. If you're spending two dollars to bring in one dollar, you're going to fail. Consolidation is an attempt to bring those costs down by reducing the number of players bidding for customers.
- yegor 4y ago
  Windscribe co-founder here. 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-industry-spells-trouble-for-the-consumer-57e638634cf0/ https://blog.windscribe.com/consolidation-of-the-vpn-industr...
  - flavmartins 4y ago
    This reminds me of Web hosting and the review industry around it 20 years back and I worked for a large web hosting provider. 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.
  - winstonprivacy 4y ago
    100% agreed with this comment. 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.
- jfengel 4y ago
  I don't know much about the industry, but I'm a bit surprised to hear about them having high margins. I'd have thought that maintaining infrastructure would be kind of a pain. You need to have outgoing access points all over the place. I assume that they mostly just rent them, but still, that's just a bunch of egress fees. And I'm sure that their customers love to stream movies through their VPN. I suppose the fact that I hear about VPNs mostly through commercials means that the margins must be high, or they wouldn't spend so much on acquisition. But it seems like an unpleasant business to be in, with a lot of overhead and customer handholding.
- jstarfish 4y ago
  > how and why VPN offering seem to have exploded recently, and how tons of them seem to be able to afford lavish ad spend even with little VC money) This is entirely conspiracy theory, but I suspect state sponsorship. Looking at our access logs over the same amount of time, we'd have our domestic users doing normal things, and then oddball traffic from Russia and China (and wherever else) trying to bruteforce credentials and probe for vulnerabilities. Then we started seeing our domestic users logging in from oddball places ("Bob doesn't live or work in ___..."), and these would turn out to be legit-- they'd be using ExpressVPN or whatever. Not ideal, but ok. But the vulnerability scans and spray-and-prays stopped coming in from foreign countries, and started coming in from known VPN ASNs-- the same ones as our legit users coming in from the same sources. While there used to be some divide between the really scummy providers and the more-sortof-legit ones, this problem has gotten even worse as these services consolidate. Now everybody's coming in from something M247-owned and that's that. These days, enough of our users have been enticed by the promises of the VPN industry that we can't really tell who's who anymore based on IP address, and the same thing is starting to happen with useragents and mail clients. I suspect a lot of our users are simply handing over credentials to foreign agencies running some of these apps at this point. Then said agency logs in over the VPN whenever they please and we don't even notice because they're coming in from the same location as the user themselves-- there's just no such thing as "normal" anymore. We can't ban the VPNs because inevitably some exec who thinks VPN will prevent his spouse from discovering his Grindr account will complain that he can't connect anymore, so it all gets enabled again. Again, conspiracy theory, but if I were a state agency, normalizing abnormal behavior is what I'd do.
IndigoIncognito 4y ago
Windscribe VPN's marketing team is honestly top notch
- kube-system 4y ago
  I'd guess they were a Windscribe reseller.
  - yegor 4y ago
    No, they never were. We had no relationship with them until now. Source: I'm a Windscribe co-founder.
    - IndigoIncognito 4y ago
      Your marketing team needs a raise Source: A happy customer
    - ignoramous 4y ago
      Hi Yegor, does Windscribe have an API (for resellers)? If so, how can one get access?
      - yegor 4y ago
        Hit me up at yegor@windscribe.com
        ignoramous 4y ago
        Sent, thanks.
    - IndigoIncognito 3y ago
      No pay rise then? :(
browningstreet 4y ago
Running a VPN service nowadays feels kind of like starting a local ISP in the early 90s. How many of those survived?
- dehrmann 4y ago
  Except most genuine use cases for VPNs are at best legally questionable.
- askura 4y ago
  I've noticed community ran ISPs are on the rise. It would be great to see a boom like in the 90s as some ISPs have such a monopoly
- imhoguy 4y ago
  Local ISPs were either replaced or taken over by larger operators. But one had to show up and put cables. VPN is rather like FTP hosting of 2020s, global and anyone with WireGuard source anyone can fork clients and make VPN in a little time, even one dev business.
Trufa 4y ago
Have never heard of neither but honestly a pretty good compromise if you ask me.
VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
I've never heard of WeVPN but honestly it's a pretty poor name. I would associate it with WeChat and just assume it's for state surveillance.
- livinglist 4y ago
  I have the same feeling towards WeWork and WePay…
  - singlow 4y ago
    At least WePay predates WeChat by a few years and WeWork was founded same year so probably before WeChat was well known.
- JohnFen 4y ago
  Interesting. I assumed it was part of the WeWork crowd and would have avoided it on that basis.
tecleandor 4y ago
It's super weird that they've removed the founder's and CEO information from the site, and there is so little information about them on the Internet. Specially when WeVPN founder claims to "have been running" Private Internet Access for years, and there's a blog post saying that he used to be the President for PIA, and some other press releases saying he was the CEO. The cache for their "about us" section [0]: Jonathan Roudier Founder VPN Experience: 8 years Jon has nearly a decade of working in the VPN industry originally in Marketing and later in leadership and senior management. With his years of insight and customer knowledge gained from running Private Internet Access®, one of the world's biggest VPN providers, Jon decided to build his own VPN to ensure that the moral and ethics which he holds true are upheld and to provide an industry leader in transparency and accountability. Outside of WeVPN, He enjoys spending time at the gym and watching movies. Press release in PIA's blog for when they bought Cypherpunk VPN [1]: Private Internet Access President Jon Roudier Press release announcing CES sponsor [2]: Jonathan Roudier, CEO of PIA, said “We, at Private Internet Access, are so thrilled..." 0: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LVfIvHK77E4J:https://wevpn.com/about-us&cd=2&hl=es&ct=clnk&gl=es 1: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/private-internet-access-london-trust-media-acquired-cypherpunk-vpn/ 2: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151221005130/en/Private-Internet-Access-Top-Mobile-Sponsor-2016
- askura 4y ago
  Interesting spot there
- urbandw311er 4y ago
  I’m sure they’re delighted that you’ve drawn attention to this and republished their personal information. /s
  - saghm 4y ago
    > Jon decided to build his own VPN to ensure that the moral and ethics which he holds true are upheld and to provide an industry leader in transparency and accountability. Seems in the spirit of their own values!
yegor 4y ago
Heya, Windscribe co-founder here. WeVPN indirectly approached us to "make their users whole" for the time that they had paid for. In the spirit of collaboration, and not further tainting the already murky image of the consumer VPN industry, we decided to comp every WeVPN users with free service for the duration of their remaining subscription. This is a goodwill gesture only, we're not engaged in any official partnership with WeVPN, and are/were not affiliated with them in any way.
- Ephil012 4y ago
  Just wanted to say I have been using your product for years and it’s been pretty great. I picked it up years ago for some lifetime vpn promotion on stack social that y’all ran. Been using it ever since and it’s been amazing.
  - yegor 4y ago
    Glad to hear! Those Lifetime accounts are crazy good value, never to be offered again. :)
- sergiotapia 4y ago
  This is great marketing. I checked you guys out and I'm in the market for a fast private VPN what's the BitTorrent story like with your VPN? I have gigabit fiber speeds, what kind of download max speed can I see with BitTorrent on windscribe?
  - yegor 4y ago
    No VPN is "the fastest" for everyone. There are many factors at play that dictate speeds, these include: your ISP, the ISP of the server location you connect to, protocol you use, 3rd party software installed (AV or firewalls are common speed reducers), etc. Most people think that one VPN oversells and runs severs at 95% NIC throughput, while another does not, and that's the only factor. Sure, some probably DO do this, but I'd wager most do not. I recommend just trying it for yourself, there is free service available. Choose Wireguard as the protocol, and try the closest geographic location to you.
bananapub 4y ago
that's rough, especially for the various law enforcement and intelligence services who lost that collection avenue.
distracteddev90 4y ago
Was affected by this, and so far, windscribe is a far superior service. The transition was seamless.

74 points by askura 4y ago

I did wonder how WeVPN were offering such low prices compared to all other VPN providers. e.g a 2-Year subscription @ $2.59 per month

askura 4y ago

Another VPN service bites it.

mardifoufs 4y ago

It's weird because the VPN industry is usually portrayed as having high margins (and it makes sense, considering how much money is spent on marketing by various VPN services). Is it a case of "winners take all", with smaller players having little revenue and profit? But then again, everyone seems to offer their own vpn now (adguard, blokada, protonmail, etc). Is it just profitable if you offer a bare minimum, almost white labeled service? (I guess I have always wondered how and why VPN offering seem to have exploded recently, and how tons of them seem to be able to afford lavish ad spend even with little VC money)

askura 4y ago
I'm seeing it more going the other way. Over the past few years so many services have been bought by bigger corps or even media companies. These bigger companies seem to be able to undercut the competition. Causing things like this I guess. Though it's anyone's guess what has happened as service over time had deteriorated quite drastically.
leros 4y ago
The barrier to entry is also pretty low. It's basically a marketing game to see who can attract customers at the best rate of return. I'm guessing there are tons of VPN startups that never get large enough to keep going and the ones that do grow probably get acquired by the bigger ones.
- askura 4y ago
  Yeah seems to be the case. Express VPN's parent corp acquired CyberGhost, Zenmate, Private Internet access over the last few years. They also paid as much as several of these put together for the marketing/affiliate websites Webselence, VPNmentor, Safety Detectives. Which shows how much money must be in these affiliate programs.
meltedcapacitor 4y ago
Sounds like a hard business for small VPN providers, getting squeezed between the cat and mouse game with content providers blocking them on one side, and users abusing the service on the other side. Same work whatever size, so better be big, or white label a big name.
- codexon 4y ago
  What work do VPN providers do get themselves unblocked?
  - CharlesW 4y ago
    Sketchy VPN providers use botnet services like Mylobot to provide residential exit nodes. https://www.bitsight.com/blog/mylobot-investigating-proxy-botnet https://www.bitsight.com/blog/mylobot-investigating-proxy-bo...
    - codexon 3y ago
      I'm talking about the mainstream ones like nordvpn and mulvad.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
majormajor 4y ago
Those marketing costs need to be included in the margins - put concretely, it means cost of customer acquisition is very high. If you're spending two dollars to bring in one dollar, you're going to fail. Consolidation is an attempt to bring those costs down by reducing the number of players bidding for customers.
yegor 4y ago
Windscribe co-founder here. 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-industry-spells-trouble-for-the-consumer-57e638634cf0/ https://blog.windscribe.com/consolidation-of-the-vpn-industr...
- flavmartins 4y ago
  This reminds me of Web hosting and the review industry around it 20 years back and I worked for a large web hosting provider. 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.
- winstonprivacy 4y ago
  100% agreed with this comment. 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.
jfengel 4y ago
I don't know much about the industry, but I'm a bit surprised to hear about them having high margins. I'd have thought that maintaining infrastructure would be kind of a pain. You need to have outgoing access points all over the place. I assume that they mostly just rent them, but still, that's just a bunch of egress fees. And I'm sure that their customers love to stream movies through their VPN. I suppose the fact that I hear about VPNs mostly through commercials means that the margins must be high, or they wouldn't spend so much on acquisition. But it seems like an unpleasant business to be in, with a lot of overhead and customer handholding.
jstarfish 4y ago
> how and why VPN offering seem to have exploded recently, and how tons of them seem to be able to afford lavish ad spend even with little VC money) This is entirely conspiracy theory, but I suspect state sponsorship. Looking at our access logs over the same amount of time, we'd have our domestic users doing normal things, and then oddball traffic from Russia and China (and wherever else) trying to bruteforce credentials and probe for vulnerabilities. Then we started seeing our domestic users logging in from oddball places ("Bob doesn't live or work in ___..."), and these would turn out to be legit-- they'd be using ExpressVPN or whatever. Not ideal, but ok. But the vulnerability scans and spray-and-prays stopped coming in from foreign countries, and started coming in from known VPN ASNs-- the same ones as our legit users coming in from the same sources. While there used to be some divide between the really scummy providers and the more-sortof-legit ones, this problem has gotten even worse as these services consolidate. Now everybody's coming in from something M247-owned and that's that. These days, enough of our users have been enticed by the promises of the VPN industry that we can't really tell who's who anymore based on IP address, and the same thing is starting to happen with useragents and mail clients. I suspect a lot of our users are simply handing over credentials to foreign agencies running some of these apps at this point. Then said agency logs in over the VPN whenever they please and we don't even notice because they're coming in from the same location as the user themselves-- there's just no such thing as "normal" anymore. We can't ban the VPNs because inevitably some exec who thinks VPN will prevent his spouse from discovering his Grindr account will complain that he can't connect anymore, so it all gets enabled again. Again, conspiracy theory, but if I were a state agency, normalizing abnormal behavior is what I'd do.

IndigoIncognito 4y ago

Windscribe VPN's marketing team is honestly top notch

kube-system 4y ago
I'd guess they were a Windscribe reseller.
- yegor 4y ago
  No, they never were. We had no relationship with them until now. Source: I'm a Windscribe co-founder.
  - IndigoIncognito 4y ago
    Your marketing team needs a raise Source: A happy customer
  - ignoramous 4y ago
    Hi Yegor, does Windscribe have an API (for resellers)? If so, how can one get access?
    - yegor 4y ago
      Hit me up at yegor@windscribe.com
      - ignoramous 4y ago
        Sent, thanks.
  - IndigoIncognito 3y ago
    No pay rise then? :(

browningstreet 4y ago

Running a VPN service nowadays feels kind of like starting a local ISP in the early 90s. How many of those survived?

dehrmann 4y ago
Except most genuine use cases for VPNs are at best legally questionable.
askura 4y ago
I've noticed community ran ISPs are on the rise. It would be great to see a boom like in the 90s as some ISPs have such a monopoly
imhoguy 4y ago
Local ISPs were either replaced or taken over by larger operators. But one had to show up and put cables. VPN is rather like FTP hosting of 2020s, global and anyone with WireGuard source anyone can fork clients and make VPN in a little time, even one dev business.

Trufa 4y ago

Have never heard of neither but honestly a pretty good compromise if you ask me.

VWWHFSfQ 4y ago

I've never heard of WeVPN but honestly it's a pretty poor name. I would associate it with WeChat and just assume it's for state surveillance.

livinglist 4y ago
I have the same feeling towards WeWork and WePay…
- singlow 4y ago
  At least WePay predates WeChat by a few years and WeWork was founded same year so probably before WeChat was well known.
JohnFen 4y ago
Interesting. I assumed it was part of the WeWork crowd and would have avoided it on that basis.

tecleandor 4y ago

It's super weird that they've removed the founder's and CEO information from the site, and there is so little information about them on the Internet. Specially when WeVPN founder claims to "have been running" Private Internet Access for years, and there's a blog post saying that he used to be the President for PIA, and some other press releases saying he was the CEO. The cache for their "about us" section [0]: Jonathan Roudier Founder VPN Experience: 8 years Jon has nearly a decade of working in the VPN industry originally in Marketing and later in leadership and senior management. With his years of insight and customer knowledge gained from running Private Internet Access®, one of the world's biggest VPN providers, Jon decided to build his own VPN to ensure that the moral and ethics which he holds true are upheld and to provide an industry leader in transparency and accountability. Outside of WeVPN, He enjoys spending time at the gym and watching movies. Press release in PIA's blog for when they bought Cypherpunk VPN [1]: Private Internet Access President Jon Roudier Press release announcing CES sponsor [2]: Jonathan Roudier, CEO of PIA, said “We, at Private Internet Access, are so thrilled..." 0: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LVfIvHK77E4J:https://wevpn.com/about-us&cd=2&hl=es&ct=clnk&gl=es 1: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/private-internet-access-london-trust-media-acquired-cypherpunk-vpn/ 2: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151221005130/en/Private-Internet-Access-Top-Mobile-Sponsor-2016

askura 4y ago
Interesting spot there
urbandw311er 4y ago
I’m sure they’re delighted that you’ve drawn attention to this and republished their personal information. /s
- saghm 4y ago
  > Jon decided to build his own VPN to ensure that the moral and ethics which he holds true are upheld and to provide an industry leader in transparency and accountability. Seems in the spirit of their own values!

yegor 4y ago

Heya, Windscribe co-founder here. WeVPN indirectly approached us to "make their users whole" for the time that they had paid for. In the spirit of collaboration, and not further tainting the already murky image of the consumer VPN industry, we decided to comp every WeVPN users with free service for the duration of their remaining subscription. This is a goodwill gesture only, we're not engaged in any official partnership with WeVPN, and are/were not affiliated with them in any way.

Ephil012 4y ago
Just wanted to say I have been using your product for years and it’s been pretty great. I picked it up years ago for some lifetime vpn promotion on stack social that y’all ran. Been using it ever since and it’s been amazing.
- yegor 4y ago
  Glad to hear! Those Lifetime accounts are crazy good value, never to be offered again. :)
sergiotapia 4y ago
This is great marketing. I checked you guys out and I'm in the market for a fast private VPN what's the BitTorrent story like with your VPN? I have gigabit fiber speeds, what kind of download max speed can I see with BitTorrent on windscribe?
- yegor 4y ago
  No VPN is "the fastest" for everyone. There are many factors at play that dictate speeds, these include: your ISP, the ISP of the server location you connect to, protocol you use, 3rd party software installed (AV or firewalls are common speed reducers), etc. Most people think that one VPN oversells and runs severs at 95% NIC throughput, while another does not, and that's the only factor. Sure, some probably DO do this, but I'd wager most do not. I recommend just trying it for yourself, there is free service available. Choose Wireguard as the protocol, and try the closest geographic location to you.

bananapub 4y ago

that's rough, especially for the various law enforcement and intelligence services who lost that collection avenue.

distracteddev90 4y ago

Was affected by this, and so far, windscribe is a far superior service. The transition was seamless.