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Comment by pogue | Hacker News Reader

Hey @nextdns team. I'm a long time customer of NextDNS. I've been using your service for a few years now, but it seems a large amount of your primarily offered services & blocklist offerings are SEVERLY out of date. I detailed that here on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/nextdns/s/IX2mUogHPK

Your input on this thread would be greatly appreciated, as the community wants NextDNS to be the best service it can be.

I do appreciate the addition of the Age Verification Bypass, though. Many users on r/nextdns are trying to guess how it works. Proxing specific domain requests to show the user is from another country is our best guess. But I would still be very interested in the specifics.

Thanks.

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I'm really surprised to see this pop up considering how the NextDNS team seems to have disappeared otherwise. Out of date offerings like you mentioned, coupled with 0 customer support when things break (and things break a lot). New features like this are fine only if the base service works. I can guess that this feature also is going to break soon, and I don't have high hopes for it getting fixed.

I moved over to ControlD about a year ago and I've been very happy. Nothing has broken, and they seem to be active about their service.

Same here, I left NextDNS because I didn't trust it anymore. I started using it personally in homelab and just found it to be randomly a bit sluggish at times. Saw other similar reports. Tried to get support and failed. I saw it trying to sell itself as business capable DNS, and considered if it would fit in at work. Then I got an e-mail giving 7 days for me to disable and move all my logs out of the EU region. I was working at a large fintech firm at the time, and if a vendor had given us 1 week to rearchitect and figure out a new logging solution for DNS, we would have dropped them immediately due to the massive compliance issues they would have created.

The messaging around the change was very much "FYI we're deleting everything in 7 days in that region whether you're good or not, feel free to do what you want", e.g. creating problems with no interest in helping with solutions to those problems. This would all be fine for a free-tier service, but I was a paying customer. Even as a paying customer though, I paid virtually nothing.

Overall, NextDNS felt like it had the worst possible combination startup, passion project and beer money project features: I paid for it for a couple of years and got fed up because the amount talk about it gave the impression to me there was a fair and growing customer base but NextDNS were missing either the capability or focus to grow the service at the time. I'm conscious they'll be reading this - it was 2 years ago this happened, so maybe things have changed.

In the replies to the reddit thread, I'm seeing a lot of people they tell me they moved to Control D. Some people had complaints about latency of the service and other factors, as it seems Control D doesn't have very extensive worldwide coverage.

But, it definitely seems to be the superior option. It's $40 a year more for the full plan, which is unfortunate, but if they offer more options, better customer support and etc it is probably worth it. NextDNS is $20 and standard Control D is the same price. NextDNS does work, but there is seemingly no support whatsoever.

I came across a Stacksocial coupon that offers $40/yr for the standard plan, so I'm tempted between the two options. The standard option doesn't offer changing location via DNS. That may not be important if you're already using a DNS, but it would be nice to have.

I bought a RPi5 with the intention of turning it into a PiHole but never got around to it, and I don't believe you can use your PiHole's DNS outside of your LAN (for example, if you use it on your mobile device and leave your local wifi, it can't connect to it's local IP).

Thanks!

This was a few years ago for me. It also aligned with my personal pendulum swinging back from cloud to on prem.

I switched to local pihole. I didn't really like it though, it felt a bit too toy-like. I then switched to adguard home, and I still use it. I've found it faster, easier and just generally more mature feeling than pihole.

Regarding using it away from local area network, I use tailscale (via selfhosting headscale) and then have adguard home joined on that, with the tailscale IP for adguard set as the DNS server for all my tailscale client devices. The only downside with this I personally face is it can be a little hit-and-miss changing networks on some older versions of Android.

If you don't mind me asking, what alternative did you move to instead? Control D?

I went to see ControlD's website to see if it was any good but the chat thingy was trying to convince me by saying "protect your connection like the Coliseum protected Rome, try ControlD's free DNS", which I guess is a way of trying something funny since I'm connecting from Italy, but it does not inspire much confidence in their protection abilities

So it protects your connection by putting up a spectacle? (assuming it meant Colosseum)

It’s clearly AI generated, and badly.

Incredible that they found a way to use AI to do anti-marketing and lose customers

A remarkable number of people seem to think "let's add AI to this!" is (a) always the thing to do and (b) don't even examine the output once before having it go live (or afterwards either).

Mine (Spain) said "control your DNS like a flamenco singer" and it doesn't make sense at all. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

From the UK you get "Explore your rules like a London detective" which barely makes sense, and is an immediately makes me think it will be useless.

US version:

“Unlock the full potential of your network with Control D's advanced filtering and security features, perfect for the land of the free.”

I don't even have to say my country, thanks AI:

"Explore your network's potential with Control D's advanced DNS analytics, perfect for a tech-savvy Canadian like you."

Same here...NextDNS randomly started intermittently breaking all connections to Apple (iCloud file sync, Apple Music etc.) and basically nothing was done about it.

Moved to AdGuard DNS, very happy with it. They have random sales throughout the year where you can buy a few years of discounted service in advance, so the cost is next to nothing...

+1 to this. I used to use their Samsung blocklist to prevent their shitty ADs being injected into my (pretty-old) tv but it's not been working for at least a couple of years.

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