I've joined several popular VPN services this year in my work on VPN Wire, and Mullvad's signup flow was by far the most enjoyable. Not only because there's no email required (a little disorienting, but very refreshing), but also because, unlike the experience on many of your competitors' sites, I didn't feel pressured to buy/commit every step of the way. User-friendly site design, in other words, is a positive signal.
I personally regard audits and pentests as strong positive signals. For example, PwC's audit of NordVPN's no logs policy was a positive for me. As someone in the industry, I'm curious if you feel the same.
Open source software and public APIs are very nice to see.
> What tools, technology, process, or ecosystem do they need to tell honest and dishonest apart?
Other than audits, I don't have a good answer to this one. I would love to hear some technical solutions, and hope other people reply!
And as an aside, kudos on running a very speedy network :) https://vpnwire.co