Show HN: A small bootstrapped independent VPN company in the Netherlands
Published in 2019, this chronicle by @j3th9n details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
Core Principles for Independent Builders:
Charging customers from day one acts as the ultimate filter for building software that solves genuine, high-urgency problems.
Keeping fixed overhead low and leveraging lean infrastructure allows founders to stay alive until market tailwinds kick in.
Small, repetitive improvements in customer retention and conversion rates yield massive returns over multi-year horizons.
Community Debate Themes:
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
CATEGORY Bootstrapping & MRR →
HISTORICAL ERA Cloud & Mobile Era (2014–2019)
COMMUNITY SCORE 154 points
TOTAL DISCUSSIONS 108 comments
Some feedback/q's:
- Your last two bullet points for 'what we do not allow' is missing newlines (https://www.wifimask.com/terms ↗)
- You load a number of JS files from third party CDNs including Cloudflare and Google without subresource integrity
- What does this offer me? It seems a lot more restrictive than other companies at lower price points, inability to use it on own libre devices, requiring proprietary software? How is this significantly different than renting a VM or two?
- Based on your cipher list in features, this is an openvpn wrapper?
- "WifiMask will also use your Personal Data to provide you with news, special offers and general information about other goods, services and events which we offer that are similar to those that you have already purchased or enquired about." - This sounds like there is no opt out, no "if you choose to", just that special offers are mandatory to receive
First, it looks good like you declare who you are. Many VPN providers seem to want to hide their real identities which is a big red flag.
I couldn't see from the website what your VPN is based on in terms of protocol? Or home brewed? OpenVPN?
Have you had 3rd party audits?
Have you considered alternative payment forms? Such as Bitcoin or other?
From your Terms of Service 'What we do not allow on or from our network...' how do you track these? Do you provide a transparency report summarising legal, copyright etc requests made, action taken?
Also from ToS 'What we need our customers to do: - Use responsible disclosure in the event any security vulnerabilities occur in our website, software or infrastructure.' Do you have a public disclosure policy notifying of vulnerabilities?
Choosing a VPN involves placing a lot of trust in a 3rd party. Hence questions.
Nice. Wifimask looks promising, esp with ad-blocking built-in. A few questions:
Where do you purchase your servers from?
How trustworthy are the underlying VPS providers across different countries that you've got presence in?
It was recently pointed out that PIA was $30 million in debt... Looks like VPN is a brutal business, but your pricing is (low?) at $4 for unlimited devices and you're bootstrapped. How do you manage to pull it off?
What are the upcoming features that you plan? Consequently, what are the most requested features?
Thanks.
I've worked with the founder (Joost H., Remy says Hi). Can vouch for him, all-round good tech guy. He was a Windows server admin at a big cloud provider (CloudVPS), I was one of the Linux guys. He knows his way around Windows, hyper v and clustering. Even some Linux. Quit his job to work full time on the startup with his brother.
Big plus one here. I'd trust wifimask if I wasn't capable of hosting my own servers and needed a VPN.
I just roll my own vpn using a vps box from ovh or hetzner using repo https://github.com/hwdsl2/setup-ipsec-vpn/blob/master/docs/clients.md ↗ ... server setup is simple and client connections are solid ... and nobody has the logs but me