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Comment by scarface74 | Hacker News Reader

Are they profitable? Because they exist don’t mean they are “thriving”.

Thriving may be a bit strong - These are small potatoes compared to apple, sure, but these are tech obsessed people buying privacy orientated products.

Librem 5 raised over $2.1 million

https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2017/10/purism-librem-5-crowdfun...

The VPN market is measured in the billions.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/542817/worldwide-virtual...

People spend money in this area. The privacy orientated crowd is willing to put their money where their mouth is.

Please keep orientating products towards it.

edit: sorry, for some reason I'm unable to reply to the comment below. Purism raised 2.1 million pre-selling their the librem 5, not in shares or anything.

You need to wait a bit for the reply button to appear. The site has a delay to prevent discussions from getting too heated. (The delay increases the deeper a comment thread gets.)

Woah, that's a really thoughtful feature. Is there somewhere I can find all of the, like, rules of HN similar to this one?

Sadly, I don't think so. The best source I know of is https://github.com/minimaxir/hacker-news-undocumented, but it's missing a lot of stuff like that bit about the reply button.

I learned about the reply button because I too was once wondering why it sometimes doesn't appear, and I Googled it.

There are enough sponsored videos on YouTube tech channels by vpn providers that I think it’s safe to concede individuals are paying for those services.

The other products and services mentioned don’t seem to be prospering the same way.

Are most people using VPNs for privacy? Every individual I know that pays for one does it so they can watch TV in a different country or something similar.

There's also lots of businesses that use them for accessing internal networks externally.

I've never met anyone in real life that is using one for privacy reasons.

Using a VPN to watch TV in another country is a privacy reason.

The end result might be privacy, but the demand is for bypassing content blocking. Your average user of a VPN doesn't care if it prevents people from identifying them, all they care about is if it lets them watch The Office from wherever they are.

Well, you could argue about whether it counts as privacy per se, but: a, they don't care to ensure that no one can identify them; b, they very much do care that it prevents whatever server they're getting The Office from from identifying them.

There were also ads for Pets.com....

Needing to raise money kind of means they aren’t profitable.

As far as the “VPN market” according to the link, they are mostly referring to businesses using VPNs in the enterprise not individual users.

Needing to raise money means they don't have the luxury of volume to produce any product and that it is a risky business. Having raised the money, though, is proof that they are indeed profitable.

Unless I misunderstand you, this is not correct. Uber, for example, has raised billions of dollars and has never made so much as a cent of profit.

> Are they profitable?

Yes. I hate this attitude that its not enough to be profitable you have to make literally all the money or your business is a failure.

How did you get from

Are they profitable

you have to make literally all the money or your business is a failure

My assumption is that the OP meant - every company is compared to Apple and Google and Facebook in terms of profit. That the business in question has to make extreme amounts of money to be considered a success, when in reality, if the business is sustainable and marginally profitable, it should be good enough for some cases.

If we're talking about privacy, there seems to be a direct correlation between the size of a companies profits and their willingness to sell your private information. As someone who values my privacy, I prefer smaller, stable companies because I'm more confident they are acting with my best interests in mind; not chasing massive growth and huge profits.

I spend quite a bit of money per month to maintain some semblance of privacy and none of the companies I support are raking in millions in profit every quarter.

Until they get bought out by a larger company.

See Onova....

Agreed. At which point I'm free to move to a different provider, but yes, this is always a possibility.

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