this post was submitted on 07 May 2024
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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