Hello and welcome, @k1vpn
What do you think, in which category should your VPN be in this thread? Privacy focused VPNs, Privacy Focused Mainstream VPNs or Non-Privacy Focused Mainstream VPNs? You are not a mainstream but I also feel like you do not belong to privacy-focused VPN's list because you aren't open-source (at least I couldn't find the information on your website). Your jurisdiction isn't the best for privacy as far as I know too.
I'm open to discussion.
Hi Synchronice and everyone reading this thread, and thank you for giving us the chance to make K1VPN better known. I also appreciate that you’re open to a real discussion. Threads like this help people decide on facts and on what they can check for themselves, rather than on big promises or big-budget advertising.
Before I answer point by point, I’d like to explain who K1VPN is built for, because it answers most of your questions.
Most people use a VPN for ordinary reasons. They don’t want their ISP, advertisers or data brokers building a profile of everything they do online. They use public Wi-Fi, or they live or travel somewhere where websites and information are blocked or monitored. Some are journalists, researchers or activists who simply can’t afford to be tracked. That is who we are building for. We want people not to be watched, not to leave traces, not to be censored, and to reach information that may not be available everywhere, or where their activity is monitored.
We are not interested in customers whose main goal is to download pirated films, watch copyrighted content such as sports without paying for it, or anything involving child abuse material. If that is what someone needs a VPN for, they should look elsewhere, because we don’t want them as customers.
That is also why K1VPN is built the way it is. We are a 100% privacy focused VPN. Customers can pay with Lightning or Monero, and payments are handled only on our own node in an undisclosed location with rotating IPs, with no third-party payment processor in the middle. That makes it almost impossible to link a payment to a person and together with our published no-activity-logs policy, we have nothing that could identify a user.
With that said, here are my answers to your points.
- On open source, I want to be precise about what is and isn’t open.
First, why our apps exist at all. They are there for beginners who just want to enter a username and password and connect to any country with ease, without dealing with configuration files where it’s easy to make a mistake.
Experienced users don’t need them. They can download the configs and set everything up exactly the way they like (providing they know what they are doing).
All our apps are built on open-source WireGuard, so the tunnel and the cryptography underneath them are the same code that is publicly reviewed by the whole community. That being said,
K1VPN is fully compatible with open-source clients like WireGuard, OpenVPN and v2rayN, as well as the native VPN clients of most operating systems.
That means you are not required to run our apps at all. If you don’t trust our closed-source client, you can connect with the open-source client you already use and trust, and see for yourself what it sends and receives.
What we haven’t published is the code of our own apps and the software behind the service. We don’t want to expose the architecture behind K1VPN, and that covers both the technical side and the organizational side. We are seriously considering opening it, but I won’t promise a date.
One more thing, so the comparison is fair: even with open-source apps, nobody outside the company can verify what happens on the server side. So for any provider, trust comes from how it is built and how it behaves in practice. We would like to be judged on that.
K1VPN LLC is a US company and I won’t argue that the US is a privacy-friendly jurisdiction on paper. That said, the US legal system strongly respects corporate structures and decisions. To our knowledge, there is no case where a US court forced a VPN provider to hand over data it didn’t have, or, worse, forced it to start logging so it could hand data over. That matters a lot to us. And people with genuinely serious criminal intentions usually have other ways to communicate and don’t depend on a commercial VPN
I’d also note that the Privacy focused list already includes Obscura, which, as far as we know, is US-based as well, so being incorporated in the US doesn’t seem to be a disqualifier in itself.
K1VPN LLC builds the apps, sells the service, and is responsible for our tax compliance worldwide. Two other companies, both owned by K1VPN LLC and located in two other parts of the world, help ensure the anonymity of our users. We don’t publish where they are and we don’t publish the details of the structure, because that is part of the protection itself.
Honestly, though, this matters less than it sounds. K1VPN is Secure by Default:
we don’t keep activity logs and we don’t ask for personal details (crypto payments only), so whichever of our companies receives a request, it cannot hand over something it doesn’t have. For us, that is a huge relief.
So to answer your question directly:
I believe K1VPN belongs in the Privacy focused VPNs section, and I’d be glad to be judged there on how the service performs in practice. If you’d like more detail on anything above, just ask, and I’ll share whatever I can disclose.
One last thing. I won’t offer free test access here, because in a thread like this it could look odd. But anyone who wants to try K1VPN in practice can do it for €2.99 with the Bitcointalk bonus, which gives 10 days instead of 7, and decide for themselves whether it suits them.
There is also a 48-hour free trial. It requires a card with no charge, handled by Stripe, and we added that step because abusers and scammers were signing up every minute for free access, and we don’t want them as customers either.
Our privacy policy is published on the site, and paying with Lightning or Monero is the route for privacy that needs neither a card nor an email.
Best Regards
Marshal
K1VPN
