Since they're a Swedish company, their yearly report is public: [1]. 25% profit margin (Vinstmarginal) does sound quite nice.

[1]: https://www.bolagsfakta.se/5592384001-Mullvad_VPN_AB

>is the VPN business that good?

One of my use cases for VPN is to watch free, legal anime on YouTube from Muse-Asia. I use a VPN to connect to Indonesia, which allows me to watch anime like Dandadan. a US IP won't show anything on their Youtube page. I'm using Mullvad VPN.

How do you see that affecting Mullvad revenue? It doesn't seem like a big business.

Dandadan is on Netflix... and Crunchy Roll.

Netflix costs a lot more per month than 5 euros. Plus you can use the VPN for countless other things.

Oh so you’re stealing. Got it.

That's a very stupid and offensive response, considering the OP explicitly wrote: "One of my use cases for VPN is to watch free, legal anime on YouTube from Muse-Asia."

But it's not free and legal where they are from, obviously, since they wouldn't need the VPN in that case.

They specifically said it's free and legal. Do you have proof otherwise?

Obviously, this stuff is merely geo-locked. There's nothing illegal about using a VPN to get around stupid geo-locking restrictions.

There is that small country called China...

You are probably aware of the "Great Firewall of China" that blocks access from mainland China to Google, Meta, etc... Which means that if you are a westerner in China and want to access the internet as you know it, or if you are Chinese and access the rest of the world, then you need some kind of VPN to bypass the restrictions.

The Great Firewall is quite advanced, and you need some layers of stealth not to be detected and blocked. Furthermore, they actively search for VPN endpoints and block their IP addresses. It limits your choice of VPNs, and Mullvad is one of the good ones for that purpose, along with Astrill and LetsVPN.

Not in China, but in a similar country using DPI inspections to block. Neither Mullvad nor any other rank and file VPN works. Need to use something like xray to bypass.

Various VPNs allow to tunnel over SSH. If they don't want to block all SSH traffic, DPI is useless.

What I understand is that they are using machine learning techniques to detect access patterns. Even if they don't understand the bytes because it is encrypted, they can match the sizes and timing of packets. So if the tunnel over SSH technique is common, and they detect a SSH connection that behaves in a specific way, for example because of fixed-size handshake packets, they can guess it is tunneling a VPN.

That was my experience.

When I was in China I would use my own VPN using ec2 and the now defunct Streisand (which uses stunnel). First few requests were always fast but as you use more bandwidth your requests would start to slow down considerably.

Oddly a foreign sim gets uncensored internet, so that's what I've recommended to travelers, but haven't been back since COVID so that might be outdated info.

do you mean, xray to a vps and install mullvad on that vps? Tried that, but as soon as I install mullvad on a vps, I'm no longer able to ssh into it. Gave up, too complex.

Have you cared to check the tiers they offer? Hint: not that many, and no free ones.

And knowing that mullvad doesn’t come close to the mainstream marketing others (well in essence one) VPN providers, your comment comes of as malicious.

I don't think its helpful to say that the comment you responded to was in any way malicious. It was a reasonable question.

It had a vary suspicions statement. They stated that they see specifically a lot of Mullvad ads. Not general VPN ads. That is what makes is sound malicious. Mullvad is not even close to being in the group of biggest marketing spenders.

You need a minute on their website to see that they have a very simple approach to funding their business. No "life time subscription" exclusive offers, no BS privacy claims...

Also this is HN, not a comment section on something like Yahoo news, really hard to consider people commenting here as being detached from tech trends and news.

>They stated that they see specifically a lot of Mullvad ads. Not general VPN ads.

I've only seen VPN ads from one company actually plastered in metro stations and inside subway cars: Mullvad. I've never seen physical ads for any other VPN provider.

I've seen lots of horribly annoying ads (or "sponsor segments") from various other VPNs, and I'm sure I've blocked orders of magnitude more of them by using SponsorBlock. But for real, in-person ads? Only Mullvad.

I'm not criticizing Mullvad here. In fact, this is probably a smart strategy on their part: if you're too clueless to use an ad-blocker online, you're not going to see other VPN providers' ads very much. But if you're highly privacy-focused, you'll already be using an ad-blocker and probably SponsorBlock too if you watch YouTube videos, so you really won't see other companies online ads much. But you can't miss physical ads on your subway ride. Their ads are also cute and clever, pointing out that a piece of paper stuck to the wall isn't tracking you the way most internet advertising does.

Mullvad has a small number of well targeted ads in my experience.

If the person above frequents certain torrent trackers, reads Torrent Freak, or travels in other small VPN adjacent circles then it's no stretch to imagine they have seen Mullvad mentioned a great deal, both through ads and through unsponsered forum members ranking Mullvad high on their HOWTO safely do {X} guides.

Surprising! I would have expected that the Venn diagram of potential Mullvad customers and uBlock Origin users would be a circle.

Thinking outside the uBlock box most of the Mullvad advertorial placement I see is from Best VPNs for the coming Dystopia articles and host forum site banners (not on typical ad black lists), fellow user guides, etc.

So, not Mullvad ads being blocked but actual Mullvad themed content positioned as of direct interest to the target demographic.

This is indeed HN, and here is a guideline for you to consider:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

Especially from someone who doesn't know all that much about the VPN business beyond seeing ads for it in some public locations and the very basics of what it is.

They provide white label for Mozilla, Tailscale and may be some others I am not aware of. Plus they really sell a lot of subscriptions.

Nit: they have a partnership with Tailscale to offer the VPN as a part of a tailnet that subscribes to the service.

But, it's not white label. White label implies it would be Tailscale VPN (or similar) with no reference to Mullvalad in their docs or marketing. But that's not what is happening with their offering.

Fair point. This is a collab.

and they've been accepting bitcoin since 2010. I assume they've done very well from that (I'm afraid to calculate what the present value of my mullvad subscription would be)

Why would they have done well? they likely use a payment processor who dynamically price their € fees in Bitcoin and immediately liquidate all Bitcoin received.

They run their own full nodes for each blockchain they support, so I highly doubt they cash out crypto that often.

> Where does Mullvad get all this money?

From their customers.

It has reasonable margins. $5 is quite a lot of money to just route traffic.

or KGB. Or both :)