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Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

Does this compare to NextDNS[1]. I moved from Pi Hole[2] to NextDNS and I'm happy with it.

No. NextDNS and Pi-Hole serve DNS requests and are mainly used for ad blocking and content restrictions on your network. They don't tunnel or redirect your actual internet traffic the way a VPN does.

This is the correct observation.

- A nextDNS user having that same question answered by official team

Shameless self-plug: NextDNS does not, but ControlD does do that - https://controld.com

Your service seems to support the same features as your provider -- are you 1:1 reselling or do you add stuff?

Not sure what you mean by that. The features are not the same, see https://kb.controld.com/compare

It says on your page you use Windscribe, they have this page

https://windscribe.com/features/robert

Sorry, purely a curiosity I didn't mean to come across as calling you out

ControlD uses transparent proxies in combination with DNS to do things you can't do with a VPN. Like this: https://twitter.com/ControlDNS/status/1358267260465463297

It's also made by the same team as Windscribe.

Just curious, are you on the free tier? Just wondering if 300k queries per month is sufficient for the average person. I have no reference to base that number on.

I was on the free tier but hit 300k requests in roughly 25 days. My primary smartphone, laptop, and parents' smartphones. Upgraded to NextDNS, happy customer for an year but jumped ship to pihole. Have two pihole devices on the Tailscale network. NextDNS was great. Checks all of my requirements. Just wanted to support open source software. I donate to pihole often instead.

I'm on the paid tier. I pay the yearly subscription. Our family of four (2 kids) easily hit 1+ Million queries a month.

I'm on the free tier and haven't hit the cap.

I've also found that I still get creepily-targeted advertising, which is presumably based on IP. For example, I watched a youtube video in Firefox Focus on my iPhone. Later that day, I saw a youtube recommendation for a very similar video (on a topic that I do not ever engage with, except for the single video earlier that days) on my laptop, in Safari.

I use NextDNS on both devices. It's nice, but it's not a silver bullet.

Oh, that's interesting. What convinced you to switch? Not having to host it yourself or some specific features?

i'm not the OP but I think it might be the issue with exposing pi-hole to the internet to access the dns outside of your home network. nextdns is cheap, i'm using it on all my devices, without the hassle to expose pi-hole to the internet.

More of Not Hosting it Myself. NextDNS is cheap enough and does the work really well. Part of my lifestyles simplification, especially when it comes to critical services.

Had few instances where some websites do not work when ad scripts are blocked. I had to debug while traveling and my wife is not too keen on tinkering with the Raspberry Pis.

NextDNS have similar issues, lots of newsletter unsubscription just fails. For NextDNS, I can just ask my wife, "Click that Shield Icon and Disable for sometime." For Mobile devices, "Open NextDNS and slide the Disable button."

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