I am surprised at how much money exists in the VPN industry. Whenever I watch even a mildly-popular YouTube video, it always has an advertisement for the latest VPN provider. As far as I can tell, there is only one reason there is this much money in the field -- to subscribe to US-based video streaming services from outside the US. But they never ever say that that's the reason, they always say things like "work from home securely" or "avoid being tracked". But, of course, your IT department already has a secure VPN for working from home, and that Facebook cookie works regardless of what your IP address is. In general, the sell of "you can't trust your network provider, so pay for an additional network provider that doesn't keep logs and only accepts payment in Bitcoins," doesn't seem particularly strong to me. Of course you can't trust the network layer. Nobody trusts the network layer. That is why we have TLS. (Anyone remember "wired equivalent privacy" when WiFi was a cool and new thing? Turns out wires don't offer much privacy.)

So why people are buying this service confuses me.

I am also confused at why people can run these services so cheaply. I looked into doing it myself (I had some ideas for actual value add), and the economics didn't seem that good. There is a lot of software between "ifup wg0" and "collect money from people that want a VPN". It seems expensive to write all that, unless a "yolo" strategy of starting up openvpn and setting up a couple NAT rules actually scales. (At the very least, you need to be able to distribute keys to pre-built clients, and if you want to make it smooth, you are looking at writing your own Windows/Mac/Android/iOS clients. Then you need all the business management software on top of that -- didn't get the Bitcoins so delete their private key, etc.) It seems like quite a bit of work that is quite expensive.

But these things exist left and right and have huge advertising budgets. So obviously I am misunderstanding something.