this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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That's one of the reasons why I love Mullvad, they actually care about their customers, not just about their bottom line
I wonder how much of a bottom line they actually have given how cheap their service is.
Mullvad is 5 bucks a month and never has promos.
Weigh that against Nord which often has a year for like 15 bucks...
But Mullvad is one of the few that actually seems to care about privacy.
Oh wow, I had no idea Nord could go that cheap. To me €5 a month felt really inexpensive.
I feel like every week someone on Lemmy says they would use mullvad except it's too expensive. It's refreshing to see somebody say oh yeah that's fine.
€5 a month for a VPN is expensive compared to others? I always saw Mullvad as one of the least expensive options other than like protonvpn and very few other open source ones. Most VPNs are hella expensive
Personally I use Mullvad because it's simple, very usable, open-source, and I can trust it the most (not to say some of the other open-source privacy-oriented options aren't trustable). Ever since I got into programming, I've only ever used completely open-source options when I had the chance – if it's not open source, I won't use it. I make very few exceptions, like for games, because open source isn't as successful there for the most part
I suppose it's all a matter of perspective. When put next to a lot of other subscription services (like Netflix 😩) it's pretty cheap. Compared to other VPNs maybe not so much? I've honestly never looked at a VPN-only service before, like Nord etc. as VPNs have never been something I've prioritised.
Still, knowing what little I know about Mullvad, €5 a month for a VPN that prioritises privacy seems fair to me. Again, it's less than any of the streaming services and if privacy is important then it seems a fair price to pay.
I think with all things globally, we apply an intrinsic sliding scale. Down to how many hours of labor that represents for us. So if $5 is a few minutes of labor fine. But if it's 5 hours of labor then people are less likely to jump on it.
Oh yes, absolutely. I am privileged to be middle-class (which I can appreciate even more as I grew up a povvo bitch) in Sweden where €5 while not nothing (for me in my economic situation) is a reasonable expense for an interest. I could rent a film for that money, or take the bus to the nearby town. I also happen to know people for whom €5 is a significant sum of money, so like previously said it depends entirely on your perspective.
I'm pretty sure they are profitable, considering they were founded in March of 2009. You can't really run a company without profits for 14 years, right? Just routing network traffic isn't that expensive after all. They are the only ones being honest about it, other VPNs charge way more because they only want to extract money from their customers.
Cheers. Network related stuff isn't my forte so I really have no idea about the costs. I just figured that the moment you start adding a decent amount of users the costs will go up, and €5 seems like a really fair price.
It's actually the other way around, the more users you have the cheaper everything eventually becomes
Economy of scale?
Yes, there's no reason this wouldn't apply to a VPN provider. It's also the reason NordVPN or Surfshark is so incredibly cheap.
They have lots of users -> They can pay lots of money for advertising -> They get more users -> Everything becomes cheaper -> They can pay more for advertising
You get the point
If only they didn't bend the knee to the five eyes and drop port forwarding
They got rid of port forwarding to improve the reputation of their IP ranges. That makes it less likely for Mullvad users to get blocked by CDNs like Cloudflare and Akamai when visiting websites. If you want port forwarding, just use AirVPN or rent a VPS and use that. Not sure what you're talking about, but Mullvad is based in Sweden, which is not a part of the five eyes alliance. It's a part of 14 eyes, but Sweden has very strong privacy laws, Mullvad even has an entire page about privacy legislation in Sweden: https://mullvad.net/en/help/swedish-legislation
They also have a page that explains how Sweden being part of the 14 eyes alliance doesn't really affect Mullvad: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/5-9-or-14-eyes-your-vpn-actually-safe
Their office was also raided by prosecutors last year, and they weren't able to seize any customer information, because Mullvad doesn't store anything about their customers: https://mullvad.net/en/blog/mullvad-vpn-was-subject-to-a-search-warrant-customer-data-not-compromised https://mullvad.net/en/blog/update-the-swedish-authorities-answered-our-protocol-request
you don't even have a "real" user account with them ffs. I think if they really wanted to fuck people over they'd have introduced mandatory email linked to accounts long ago
Yup, and you can pay using crypto or cash if you want, and you'll never need to let them know who you are, where you live, etc. All they care about is that your account number gets paid, and that's it.
You could always tunnel a publicly routable IP address over your VPN... I.e. https://tunnelbroker.net/
5 eyes shit is dumb pop security anyway. As if the CIA can't rent colo space in Kazakhstan and market you some extra spooky VPN.