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>I also have no idea, in the context of modern web browsing, how large or small 300,000 DNS queries per month is[1]. It seems quite large to me - as if even my entire household would never possibly produce 300k DNS queries each month ... but perhaps I underestimate how many queries modern web pages produce ?

I just looked at my NextDNS stats dashboard for the previous 6 hours and it says 5900 queries. I was surprised by that high number. The intuition is to count in terms of manual clicks on urls but the part I underestimated is how "chatty" many web pages are with Javascript (e.g. analytics, ads, etc). In my case, I see about 1000 hits in 6 hours to just 2 urls: msh.amazon.com, content.googleapis.com.

Based on being awake 16 hours a day over 30 days, I extrapolate ~540,000 queries per month. This is for 2 people with no kids at home at the moment.

If my modest internet usage is ~540k queries per month, I'm guessing NextDNS definitely did the spreadsheet modeling to come up with 300k threshold so most people easily pass it after mid-month and therefore enticed to pay for the service to continue the ad blocking. When I get to that point, I'll re-evaluate the idea of setting up a Raspberry Pi-Hole. I really don't want to mess with hardware.

Maybe if I'm more aggressive with a local "hosts" file to locally block more sites to 127.0.0.1, I can drastically cut down the number of DNS queries hitting NextDNS.

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