I’ve used proton for a year or two now and it is fine. Great for use on my phone when I want to use public/airport wifi and it sort of kind of works with gluetun (the rotating port is annoying but it still is a forwarded port).
But I’ve increasingly been annoyed with Proton as a company and am looking to migrate my email/domain to fastmail in the very near future. I COULD continue to just pay for the vpn (60 USD a year is pretty reasonable) but also feel like this is a good opportunity to “shop around”
Checked the wiki and other FAQs (which all basically crib from said wiki) and they all basically boil down to proton or mullivad… except that mullivad apparently stopped allowing port forwarding which is a bit of an issue for any torrents and the like.
So are there any other good options?
Thanks
I think a safe assumption is that anyone that runs over half of their budget in ads can’t be trusted.
I have no opinion of them, but I’m curious why advertising would imply untrustworthiness. Are you saying they’re too eager or something? Spending money on ads is also consistent with a company that’s making money by charging for a service — I’d be more suspicious of free VPNs.
My experience with products that lean so heavily into the sponsors is that they’re usually mediocre in terms of your overall choices. Basically, the ads kind of give me bad vibes. I admit, it’s not a rational judgment, but I won’t go out of my way to find out if NordVPN is actually good when there are alternatives.
If many people feel the same way, it may be evidence that sponsors are an outdated method of advertising.
It is more than a bit of a fallacy, but the general idea is that any product worth using will distinguish itself. Whereas the products that spend vast amounts of money on advertisement “can’t stand on their own”.
Like I said, it is a fallacy that insists companies should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and ignores the reality of the landscape these days.
THAT said: nordvpn goes REALLY hard on the advertisements and is still one of the more popular/few remaining big sponsors for podcasts and influencers. And THAT gives me pause because it has generally been shown that those are horrible venues for “getting a product out there” and mostly exist to take advantage of parasocial relationships. And, based on the linus media group leaks and corroboration from various twitch streamers, the big outfits are asking for a LOT of money per sponsorship spot.
And considering there is no way to really vet a VPN and you are inherently trusting them to do what they say they do (or do the good version of what they don’t even bother to talk about)…
You’d probably be surprised that the companies that spend the most money on advertising are the biggest and most successful companies on the planet.
The number of leads youtube/podcast advertising generates is not that impressive, the number of leads that become buyers is even less impressive. When a company spends too much on this type of advertising for a product that is not “premium”(meaning overpriced shit), it casts a shadow of doubt on where they get their revenue.