New Year's Q&A with AdGuard VPN CPO

Hi all! My name is Denis and I’ve been working on AdGuard VPN as Chief Product Officer for over 5 years. Today, I’d like to reflect on our work in 2024, share our plans for 2025, and just have a chat with you. I hope to make this a tradition.

A few days ago, we invited you to post questions on our social media, and it seems you liked the idea. Thank you all for your questions — there were more than a hundred of them, and I read every single one of them. In this New Year’s edition, I’ll answer several of them. I’ve also noted the complaints and suggestions I couldn’t address right now, but I’ll make sure to take them into account in the new year and incorporate the improvements and corrections you proposed into our plans.

Audit

I am subscribed to both Adguard and VPN. I believe in my heart that your VPN is “safe,” in terms of hiding user identity and not disclosing to Govt. But my head does not believe — I see no independent audit or internal audit policy to trust 100%

This is one of the most frequently asked questions from users around the world, and it’s completely understandable. Many VPN services, especially the top ones, have already started conducting technical audits, which is undoubtedly a very valuable practice. This year, we even engaged in discussions with an auditing company, but ultimately, we decided to postpone it.

The thing is, in our minds, we have a clear plan and goal that we’re steadily working towards. The problem is that it’s taken much longer than we originally anticipated…

Our number one priority is refining our protocol. Incidentally, questions about the protocol are the second most common we receive — but I’ll get to this topic later. Our intention is to first release the protocol as open source, and only then proceed to tackle everything else.

For several years now, we’ve been developing our own protocol, comparing it with competitors, and refining it. Frankly speaking, we’ve become somewhat fixated on it, but at the same time, it sure wasn’t for nothing, allowing us to provide a functioning service in countries where many other VPNs can’t operate. In the current global climate of increasing censorship, this is incredibly important.

I had planned (and publicly stated) that we would release our protocol as open source this year. Unfortunately, this didn’t happen in 2024.

We don’t want to repeat the fate of Cyberpunk 2077 — for us, it’s crucial to deliver a high-quality product, which is why we intend to present it only when it’s fully ready. At the moment, the timeline has been moved to the end of the first quarter of 2025, and believe me, we’re almost there.

Answering the initial question, we will return to auditing, but only after we open the source code of our protocol.

Speed

How does AdGuard VPN’s connection speed compare to other services?

This is my favorite question! Because over the past five years, it feels like there hasn’t been a single day without someone contacting our support team about VPN speed.

From time to time, we measure our speed and compare it with that of competitors. We see different results in various situations, but overall, VPNs that continually optimize their architecture show roughly the same performance.

There are countless factors that affect speed, many of which aren’t directly related to the VPN itself. For example, the “connectivity” between you and the servers. This can either be like a direct, fast road or resemble a winding, hard-to-navigate path through another country.

That’s why I’d like to emphasize that VPN speed reviews, especially those conducted in different countries, shouldn’t always be taken at face value. If you were to conduct a pure test on the same network under identical conditions in a lab in Texas and identify a winner, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the winner would be the same in similar conditions in a lab in Denver.

Third-party protocols

Do you plan to implement PPTP, Wireguard or OpenVPN protocols in your services? These protocols are very commonly used by other providers. Thank you.

I already touched on this topic in my answer to the first question. First, we’ll make our protocol open source, and only then will we consider other protocols (not just the ones mentioned).

The challenge here lies in the fact that we’ll need to adapt our entire architecture to accommodate the new protocol, and that’s no easy task. This raises the question of whether it’s worthwhile and justifiable at all. Looking ahead, I’d say, at the moment, I believe it is. But we still need to discuss this with the team.

Network bridge

Would you consider a feature that allows two clients using the same account to create a sort of network bridge between the two? A VPN LAN of sorts.

This is an interesting feature, although it is not yet clear how popular it can be. I would like to study this issue in the future and I think that it is not even necessary to have one account for this. The range of applications is quite wide — from file sharing to remote access and games over a local network.

In the new year we will need to choose the next big feature and we will definitely consider this as one of the options.

Dedicated IP

Please, make dedicated IP like other main VPN-providers

This is a sore subject… To be honest, the profitability of us implementing this service is close to zero. IP addresses are inherently expensive, and on top of that, they lead to increased support requests and infrastructure costs.

Since we operate in many countries with censorship, another problem arises with IP addresses. It all depends on the blocking methods, but there’s always a chance that one day the provider we rent the IPs from will have their addresses banned. In fact, it’s almost inevitable.

Now imagine maintaining the functionality of your infrastructure for a million users every single day. That’s a complex task requiring significant skills and resources. On top of that, you’d also need to manage thousands of additional addresses individually assigned to each user — all for just $3–4 a month, while renting a single IP address can cost $2–3.

Many VPN providers even warn users when purchasing dedicated IP addresses that they might not work in countries with censorship. That’s because it’s nearly impossible to provide personalized support for every single user.

I bring this up because I often encounter the misconception that a dedicated IP is a silver bullet against censorship. But that’s not the case. Dedicated IPs have many advantages: no CAPTCHAs, no sharing your IP with thousands of other users, less likelihood of being on blacklists, and so on. However, bypassing censorship isn’t one of them.

I’ve strayed a bit from the main point, but the essence is this: dedicated IPs are a low-margin service with potentially significant issues in countries with censorship where we operate. For this reason, the matter has been put on the back burner.

New location

Want Thailand Server. I wait for years 🥹🥹🥹

Thailand is an amazing and beautiful country with wonderful people. I was there once, made friends with an elephant, went to a concert in Bangkok, rode all over Phuket on a bike and dream of returning.

Will add a Thai server in Q1!

Linux support improvement

When will the Linux support be improved

Please, have mercy upon us 🙂 We recently released the first version. This product isn’t our top priority, but for now, we plan to release updates every three months. You can greatly help us by reaching out to our support service with suggestions for improvements. The support team always passes on the feedback you send, and if it’s feasible, we try to include it in the next release.

Money

Where do you get money for development? I think VPN subscriptions are not enough

It’s just that we all work for food and the corporate New Year’s party. By the way, it’s on Saturday.

Displaying server load

Why don’t you implement display of server load? Sometimes you need good speed without looking at ping or country.

We’ve been asked about this several times. However, there’s no real point in implementing it. We have traffic balancing across servers in the same location, so we don’t encounter situations where one server is overloaded while another is underused (as some other VPN providers might).

We have dashboards and alerts in place, so when server traffic starts nearing maximum capacity, we quickly purchase and deploy additional servers.

Problems may only occur during sudden traffic spikes, and, in fact, we experienced such an issue recently. However, in the overwhelming majority of cases, each server has a significant reserve capacity. So, if you notice speed issues, 98% of the time, they’re not related to our servers.

The issue might be tied to the infrastructure we’ve built in countries with restrictions. This is easy to check — compare VPN connection speeds in countries with censorship versus those without; the difference can range from 2 to 5 times. In any case, we are constantly optimizing everything that can be optimized, and I hope that over time, we’ll improve this situation.

Free version

When will you turn off free GB for the poor?

Firstly, the wording of the question is kept original — I didn’t change it 🙂
Secondly, five years ago, when the decision was being made about whether or not to offer a free version, I was the only one in favor of it (and, as you can see, I managed to convince everyone else). Apparently, I’m on the same page as the “poor”!

Censorship

How does AdGuard VPN combat blocking of VPN services in countries where they are banned or restricted?

I have already partially answered this question above. But I would like to elaborate. Our protocol helps us a lot as it obfuscates traffic, and our internal architecture, which we continuously improve, plays a key role in combating blockings.

I won’t go into technical details, but it’s safe to say that it is an endless arms race. Sometimes it’s tough, but we keep going. We have graphs showing our VPN’s availability across different countries and even on different networks. We constantly monitor the situation, although our adversaries sometimes come up with very clever methods.

Overall, it’s a never-ending journey, and I’m proud of our team, which, unlike many other VPN providers, genuinely strives to improve the product.

Contest result

Will you send me some merch? What else can I ask if everything works…

Sending it! We will contact you soon.

In conclusion

I would like to briefly summarize the results of the past year and share our plans for the next one.

This year has been quite challenging for us. Two major things happened simultaneously: the number of our users grew significantly, and we encountered complex blockings. We found ourselves lacking the resources to both bypass these blockings and continue developing our applications. This year, we were literally just surviving, but despite that, we managed to release very important updates for all our platforms, as well as the Linux version.

Unfortunately, there is a lot that we didn’t manage to accomplish. The most disappointing was our plans regarding our protocol. I confidently said it would be ready this year (and the support team conveyed this information to you), we all expected it to happen, but it didn’t.

At times this year, I even felt like we had somewhat frozen in development, as all our efforts were focused on putting out fires instead of pushing forward.

But, if we look at it from another perspective… what’s important is that we are still here. We have significantly upgraded our infrastructure, brought in new team members, streamlined processes, and withstood the blockings in key countries for us.

I hope that in the new year, we will be able to move forward, bring all our plans to life, release more important updates, and of course, add a Thai server! We have a couple of surprises in store for you that we’ve recently started working on. I won’t reveal all the details, but you’ll love it!

I would like to thank all our users for staying with us.
And a special thanks to our team (I know how hard it’s been).

Happy holidays,
AdGuard VPN CPO