can I make some money by selling my self hosted VPN and dns?
Technically: yeah, maybe.
In practice: would be hard.
Commercial VPNs are either selling convenience (Tailscale), privacy (via high ad spend to convince people they want privacy or audits to prove it to the people who already know), or rule bypassing (torrenting, georestrictions for netflix, etc.)
You wouldn’t be the most convenient, you (probably) don’t have the money for a big ad spend or audits (or wouldn’t recoup it) and I doubt your self hosted VPN has 30 POPs across the world: basically, why would anyone pay you money when they could pay Tailscale or Mullvad instead for better functionality.
Plus, like u/MajesticWaterBuffalo mentioned, gl;hf if your users do the illegal on your network.
DNS is another hard one: In addition to having to deal with the handful of different ways DNS servers can be abused, DNS is definitely one of those things that makes people VERY unhappy when it’s not working. Especially for paying customers, you’d want to make sure your DNS is not going down because if it’s down, you’d get lots of grumpy calls/emails from your users.
Plus, why would someone want to use your DNS? Quad9, Google DNS and Cloudflare DNS are all free.
Also yeah, like u/BurnyLlama said, why would they trust you? Are you aiming to sell to your friends & family? Enjoy the texts/phone calls/whatever whenever it’s a little not-worky and expect to not really make a ton. Are you selling to randos on the Internet? Good luck, NordVPN has a lot more ad spend than you do and VPNs are pretty much entirely a numbers game if you’re trying to actually make money (plus stuff like audits, POPs, etc. can be $$$)
It’s not impossible to make some beer money, but I’d probably not recommend it with those specific services at least.
In theory, yes. But in practice, maybe not that easily. For example, why would any buyers trust a random person on the internet?
Lmao it has been a long time since I last posted on reddit and I got more unjustified downvotes than ideas. Never again, reddit lol
Presumably Residential Proxy companies pay people such as yourself to host their exit nodes. No idea how you’d go about making those deals.
I paid for a VPN I’d never heard of (PIA) until I saw impressive recommendations here (on Reddit). I like the basic decent interfaces, and it behaves well. They managed to beat NordVPN to my wallet, and seem to be doing well for themselves. So yah, I think there’s room for competition.
Mysterium’s decentralized vpn for example is innovative and managed to attract clients who are interested in residential IP addresses, clients who are in need of free speech and better privacy with no data logs no tracking than those multi billion dollar companies offer.
The network has enough clients, but it seems like they prefer some countries rather than others which makes it profitable for some and unprofitable for the rest. I just thought maybe I could take a shortcut and sell it directly to students, professors, people who use their laptops in public places…etc
Ouch. Unless I get the real name of who I sell it to?
Makes sense. But why would they trust a multi billion dollar company over their data?
If the goal is to circumvent geoblocking and only a streaming device is connected, e.g. using something like a GL.iNet Mango to VPN-enable a device like an AppleTV that doesn’t have native VPN capabilities, there isn’t much risk.
If you’d fleshed out your ideas better, there’d probably be a less grumpy response. You’re like the 3rd guy this week to post about making money with self-hosted stuff though, and the general trend is that nobody actually puts thought into the question and wants Reddit to figure out their whole-ass business plan.
There’s so much more to running a business than just “Well I know how to use Docker” that isn’t included in these posts (including yours) so it feels pretty low effort IMO.
If you were to try this type of post again, try including more about your plans here. So you want to make some money? Cool:
- Why do you think this is a good market?
- What value does your self-hosted service provide against existing paid services?
- Who’s your target audience?
- What’s your software stack?
- What scale are you aiming for? (Beer money, quit your day job, etc.)
- How do you plan to handle the legal issues that can arise from this market? Do you know the potential issues?
- What about security issues, how will you handle those?
- Hosting scale? Are you planning on just using up some unused cycles on one box? Scaling out to multiple? How would you handle that scale?
- Customer expectations? Support SLAs? Uptime? How do you handle those? What do you do if your IP gets banned from Netflix or shoved on DroneBL?
- Upstream TOS? Does your ISP even allow this? Are you prepared to handle if they tell you to GTFO for TOS violations?
- Customer management? How would you handle payments, onboarding, offboarding?
- Et cetera
Coming in with “I’m gonna DIY this… and people will like it because I’m not huge” doesn’t really give context, sounds kind of cocky, and sounds like a really low effort “figure out my business”. You’d definitely want to think of answers for the above before actually launching this idea, and ideally would want to have at least some of them answered before asking around, because otherwise it’s too open and too not-thought-out for people to really think is worth being asked.
Fun fact! Generally, no, the exit nodes aren’t paid directly from many of the larger residential proxy companies.
At least from what I’ve seen, the most common thing is that people download a “free VPN” and in exchange for using the VPN, they get turned into an exit node.
At least from what I’ve seen:
- People who want “security”/“privacy” don’t really care about residential IPs.
- People who want to bypass things (e.g. Netflix, geoblocking) might care more, but those are a little harder to find — why would someone in your local coffee shop or whatever want a residential IP for the country they already have a residential IP in?
It’s not impossible and could generate some beer money, but there’s a lot of work that would need to go into it, which would honestly probably make it not worth the effort for a DIY project.
So how does this no logs and full privacy thingy work exactly. I buy your service and commit a crime. You have no idea what I did, maybe you are not even sure who did it. Will you go to jail because of me?
Multi million dollar companies have a reputation. You are unknown. You wouldnt trust a random service that nobody knows anything about, either. At least I hope so.
Thanks for info on the barter trade.
Didn’t those companies had to start somewhere? Plus why would it matter since self hosted services are much much cheaper than what companies offer. If you feel unsatisfied by the billion dollar company’s product you most likely will only change to another provider. There isn’t much you can do. Ask a refund for your few dollars subscription maybe?
Gosh express a different idea and redditors will downvote you to death lol
> Much much cheaper
VPNs are already pretty much in a race to the bottom on price. Most are still pushing multi-month terms (monthly/1yr/2yr seems common), but these generally work really well, and you can easily find VPNs for $1-2/mo on a longer term.
You could possibly compete on the monthly level; for someone who just needs a VPN for a month or two, $5 would be better than $10, but those aren’t the clients generating you long term MRR, they’re the ones adding extra work for you to handle provisioning, deprovisioning, etc.
DNS, it’s rare to ever see anyone charged for that — some companies (like NextDNS) charge once you’ve passed a pretty damn generous free tier, but most “normal” DNS options are literally free.
Thank you, makes perfect sense.