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How do VPN providers manage to stay in business? (piefed.socdojo.com)

submitted 12 hours ago by ShellMonkey@piefed.socdojo.com to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

20 comments fedilink hide all child comments

So I was just renewing a contract with a VPN provider, and paid out for a couple years it works out to somewhere under $2/month.

ISPs around me can run from about $50-$150/month

If I'm putting the major bulk of my traffic over a tunnel that could eat up a sizable chunk of a given connection point for the provider that I'm sure costs more than $2/month to maintain. I would have to assume it would take the combined subscriptions of several users to pay for a given node.

So how does that work as a business model? Unless these VPN providers are getting a steal on their connections it's hard to envision how they can manage to pay their costs without these nodes being absolutely bottlenecked when a few people start streaming some shows.

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[–] Mavytan@feddit.nl 4 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

Others have given plenty of good reasons. But on top of that they'll make money from all the people paying for the subscription but currently not using it, like any subscription service does. Most users won't use their vpn 100% of the time

[–] ShellMonkey@piefed.socdojo.com 1 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

I'm something of an outlier in the use level for sure with all the self hosting. When my kids starts downloading these several hundred GB games for the consoles though that take hours to pull it can sure eat the bandwidth up. Makes me wonder what the more typical home user's average is.

[–] Mavytan@feddit.nl 1 points 1 hour ago

Less than a GB per day on average for me, don't use it most of the time, mostly for watching content abroad