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Comment by yegor | Hacker News Reader

NordVPN is probably raking it in right now with the amount of BS marketing that they do....

Really gives some insight to why VPN companies have been fighting for mindshare the past few years. Just waiting for a case like this to pop up and be the first service people think of.

It worked for https://greenhealthdocs.com/ in Maryland. They advertised heavily before legalization framework was in place.

People didn't know they just needed to fill out a state form that's approved automatically pay $50 to the state, and pay a small fee $75-$80 to a certified doctor, dentist, nurse, or midwife for a cannabis recommendation.

Instead, they greenhealth charges 200 bucks to people.

$200 vs $130, billed by one provider instead of several, and you can figure out how to do it via the internet seems... fine?

Least profit-gouging healthcare provider in the country.

$70 convenience fee that is one time seems like an ok amount to spend for a one time specialized shortcut.

Is it BS in this case though? VPNs are the best tool in this scenario, and when you want to avoid geoblocking in general.

FoxyProxy gives each user a dedicated server for the same price as NordVPN shared servers.

And what is the average user supposed to do with it? I doubt that most people are even aware that you can ssh into a server and configure it for tunnelling your internet traffic, let alone knowing how to do that.

Can that dedicated server magically be in completely different locations in seconds at the press of a button?

It's not like vpn providers are renting out one shared server. Being able to pick between countries is a key feature. Shared servers might actually be an advantage too. If your vpn is on a unique IP, it's probably easier to deanonymise you from bulk data.

Speeds are much better when you’re the only one using a server. As for multiple countries, that’s an option but I don’t know pricing.

This is like hearing that your aunt bought an iPhone and ridiculing them because the latest Samsung fire hazard has more megahertz of RAMs.

Nobody cares, and if you aren’t tying this to user value from the get-go, you’re fighting a losing battle.

In Australia, we can usually get over 80% cash back with NordVPN

NordVPN actually inspired me to work on my current personal project: a "human" ad blocker for sponsored content on Youtube: https://github.com/paprikka/butter

I'll push a more stable version later this week. Feel free to spam me via the email in my profile desc if you have any feedback or ideas.

How does it work? I personally use this one https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sponsorblock-for-y...

It requires users to provide timestamps for "sponsored by" content, so the player skips over it.

Sponsorblock is also integrated into piped for example https://piped.video/

I extract text from video captions and use GPT to detect the sponsored time stamp candidates.

The upside is that it can work for any video without the initial user interaction. Manual/user corrections can be applied afterwards ofc.

I’m trying to figure out if it can be good enough to be considered useful at this stage. Sponsorblock looks great. The reputation score/leaderboard is a superior approach imho.

The ROI on VPNs with even a little marketing is huge and you don't need tons of networking people to scale.

That's not true. Ask me how I know. :)

Im sorry, but you are misinformed.

You barely do marketing

How do you know?

He's Yegor Sak, founder and CEO of Windscribe which is a VPN, however the prices don't even compare to the bigger guys, it's more expensive than even Mullvad.

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