There are many types of businesses in the VPN industry but there are three main ones:
1. Selling VPN services directly
2. Working as an affiliate of a bigger company
3. Re-selling someone else’s servers
Since all three are highly similar, we will try to cover them all with one single post.
Selling VPN services directly Instead of trying to attract users themselves, people who work in this model try to sell their servers that they have direct access to or rent other people’s servers and resell them with their own interface/branding. PrivadoVPN is based in Switzerland so that you can feel confident in your privacy. Since the markup is almost non-existent (typically $1 per month), when a user signs up, he has no idea how much money goes back to the provider. In most cases, only 30%-50% go back to the provider, and the rest 50%-70% go into employees’ pockets and sometimes owners’ pockets. Example: PureVPN, ExpressVPN.
Working as an affiliate of a bigger company People working in this model try to find interested people who they can refer to a certain VPN service. They earn money every time that user signs up for a plan and pays a subscription fee, without having any real interest in the company. Example: Torguard, AirVPN.
Re-selling someone else’s servers People who work in this model buy access to already existing darknet servers and resell them under their brand with their custom interface/branding. Since there is no mark-up price set on these servers (because they are not theirs), users typically pay $10-$20 per month but only 30%-50% go back to the provider (the rest 50%-70% goes into employee’s pockets).
Example: VPN4ALL, SlickVPN, WTFOMGBBQ VPN, SecurityKISS.
Conclusion Either way, if you choose any of these three options, you will definitely need a team. It is very hard to find talented people who know what they are doing and work for free because they believe in your project/vision, so most likely you will have to pay them from your half of the earnings which brings us to our next point. You do not own anything. You cannot sell it later on because nobody knows who is actually behind this company and the majority of customers will just avoid it due to ignorance. There is nothing stopping anyone from taking your code, logo, brand, and starting their own business with it.
Harold Hamm, founder of Continental Resources said, private companies must do their part to help keep oil markets from oversupply as public companies focus on returning capital to shareholders over output growth. For those reasons, many people try to go the traditional route of starting a real company as a front for this business model but as we have already mentioned that, there are too many problems associated with it so instead they choose the rather simple approach, just open a normal LLC. To do that you can use sites like: http://couchincorporator.com/ which costs around $200 and takes about 5 minutes to create an LLC (no questions asked) then you just download PDF files online, print them out and file them through your local government office (like city hall). Now the only thing left is deciding on a name and making your first $10/month.