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Comment by babyslothzoo | Hacker News Reader

Great idea, but how is this monetized or supported? What are they doing with the data?

They sell their AdGuard program on Android. Because the full version of the program isn't available on the PlayStore (it breaks rules by interfering with other apps) they depend a lot on marketing and word of mouth to get new customers.

The code for their DNS servers is actually open source, so if you want the functionality without relying on AdGuard you can run your own server.

https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdguardDNS

It doesn't cost that much to run a DNS server, even with DoH/DoT. You can easily serve a few million users with a milisecond latency off a cheap instance with 2GB instance.

That's not to say the cost is zero, but with with multiple caching layers (O/S, browser, router, etc), and serving same results for everyone, server costs are not very high.

This might be a little more expensive than usual if it returns NXDOMAIN for known ad serving domains. Many DNS clients don't cache failures.

Don't know how AdGuard does this, but pihole returns 127.0.0.1 for ad-serving domains. I don't know enough about DNS to guess why it does that instead of returning a failure, though my guess is that maybe doing so prevents software from falling through to a user's secondary DNS server.

Interesting. Could produce odd results if you run a local webserver and don't have SNI on. Seems like that behavior should be something configurable.

Edit: Apparently it is. https://pi-hole.net/2018/05/18/nxdomain-and-null-blocking-wi...

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