Hacker News Reader

They don't though. A lot of VPN services operate for free. A lot of my classmates in high school used free VPNs to bypass the school internet filters.

I wonder how their business continues to operate if their product is free...

View on HN

Hola VPN, one of the largest free ones, is operated by BrightData. They make money with their residential and mobile proxy service. By using Hola, you act as an edge node in what is essentially a legal botnet, and Bright Data charges like $10/gb to clients who want to use it for scraping,etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com