At Windscribe, we believe that the internet should be free of censorship, personal data harvesting, targeted advertising, and geographic restrictions. We adhere to this philosophy very seriously, it is what distinguishes Windscribe from most other VPNs out there.
Windscribe is entirely self funded. We don't have any VC's breathing down our necks and telling us what to do. Our users are our principal investors, and we are beholden only to them. Ensuring their online privacy with simple and easy to use software keeps our lights on, and we wouldn't have it any other way.
You can create a Windscribe account without sharing a shred of your personal information. We don't collect any identifying data: you don't have to provide us a name or email address, and you can pay us with crypto to ensure your anonymity. Together we can ensure that all of your identifying information remains yours, and yours alone.
Of course if you want to use your email address, we won't say no, and we guarantee that the only thing your information will be used for is hilarious emails, newsletter updates and give the ability to reset your password if you forget it. We believe the only right way to make money is to make it by creating a product that is so good, you actually want to pay for it. Therefore, we will never sell the information you willingly provide us to anyone, under any circumstances.
The Windscribe website does not contain any 3rd party analytics, tracking pixels, A/B test platforms, or social widgets. That means that when you visit our website, you can be absolutely positive that your activity does not leak out to any 3rd party data harvesting platforms. We wish we could say the same about the majority of other VPN providers. But we can't. So we won't.
When you use our service you will not directly interact with any cloud hosted tools, or clouds in general. We self host all the software we use, on single tenant dedicated machines we either own or lease from reputable hosting providers.
A VPN is not a magic privacy button powered by "military grade encryption". A VPN alone will actually do very little for your privacy, and is just one of several tools that you should have in your toolbelt. The other being our browser extensions, which are jam-packed with additional privacy features that go above and beyond of what's available from any other VPN company.
We don't have a traditional marketing department staffed with snake oil salesmen. We have a real-time Transparency Report, which provides you with a real time feed of data requests we receive. If we make a mistake, we tell you about it, even though it would have been very easy not to. Virtually all of our client software is open source, so you can validate any claim we make yourself.
Despite us being a for-profit company, we cannot engage in practices that conflict with our philosophy and ethics. This means we cannot use the vast majority of "growth tools" that other VPN companies use.
Sadly, heavy user tracking has become the backbone of modern advertising. This is why you get bombarded with ads relating to everything you search for, talk about and seemingly think about. As a privacy company, we cannot in good conscience engage in the same practices we claim to prevent.
This is why Windscribe does not advertise on any platform. And since we don't advertise, we have no need for pesky 3rd party trackers to gauge our ad spend.
You may be familiar with "VPN Review" sites. What you probably don't know is that 99% of them rank VPNs based on a single metric - who pays the most. We no longer participate in the competition of who can offer a higher $CPA to a marketer masquerading as a "security researcher".
Those who review us are not incentivized to do so in any way, which is why you may find many of our media reviews to be very outdated, since SEO marketers don't get paid by us anymore.
Have you even been on Youtube? Did you notice something that feels outright weird? We'll get to the point, but first a word from our sponsor!
YouTube and Twitch are full of awesome creators/streamers producing great content on literally any topic you can imagine. Some of those topics are relevant to online privacy, however, the vast majority are not. Those who don't produce content relevant to online privacy and security have no business promoting such products. While other VPN companies have no issues with this, we do. Which is why you won't find us sponsoring any non-relevant creators.
Instagram and TikTok "influencers" have a lot of reach. A single post can generate hundreds of thousands of dollars of revenue. Unfortunately, those who have that kind of reach are usually not tech professionals and have absolutely no business promoting privacy and security products for the highest bidder. This is why we don't pay them to shill for us.
Since we don't engage in the common predatory growth practices of our industry colleagues, you may be wondering how Windscribe grows: the simple answer is - word of mouth. How do we maximize good word of mouth? Read on!
It's a lot easier to convince someone to try a product if they don't need to part with their money to use it. This is why Windscribe operates on a freemium model. This means that the base software is free, but with some limitations.
Users that wish to gain unlimited access to all of our features on all of our servers can do so for a small monthly cost. These Pro users can enjoy unlimited access to 100+ server locations around the world, as well as features like port forwarding, geo-unblocking and a fully customizable online experience.
Our Pro users are directly responsible for helping us run the business. Even more importantly, the money Pro users pay us helps provide and maintain our free-tier service to users around the world that may not be able to afford the privacy they need, and deserve.
Remember earlier on when we said our users are our only investors? Well investors always have a say in the companies they invest in. We engage directly with our users every single day, across a multitude of channels, including, but not limited to:
You can reach our CEO, co-founders, and staff directly through any of the channels listed above. We listen to every issue that our users have and engage in discussions on features, improvements, favorite snacks, you name it.
Since our marketing budget is $0, we use the money to hire staff, develop new features, and improve the product. Our competitors pay huge portion of their revenue to Google, Facebook, Twitter, VPN review sites, and social influencers. This effectively helps sustain the very practices they claim to protect you from.
Like what you've read? We encourage you to share this page with anyone who would find this interesting. Word of mouth is the only way Windscribe can grow, hire more people and build better products that you'll enjoy.