Atlas VPN

» see atlasvpn.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Atlas VPN was the cheap one. Peakstar Technologies started it in 2019 into a market that already had a dozen established names, and the way in was a free tier that did not meter you. Most free VPNs of that period gave you a few hundred megabytes a month and then asked for a card. Atlas gave you unlimited data on a short list of locations, which for anyone who only needed a tunnel occasionally was the whole product.

It built the rest out at a decent clip. By August 2023 it ran more than a thousand servers across 49 locations, on WireGuard and IPSec with a choice of ChaCha20 or AES-256, and it had started swapping in 10 Gbit/s hardware that February. There was a data breach monitor bolted on, and apps that reached down to Apple TV and Fire TV, which is further than most of its competitors bothered to go.

The marketing had a politics to it, or at least a posture. In March 2020 the company handed out three months of premium service free, framing it around coronavirus misinformation and arguing that internet censorship was leaving people in some countries badly informed about the outbreak. In February 2022 it gave year-long subscriptions to media workers in Ukraine. Both were PR exercises, and both described the product's actual use accurately enough.

~ the record ~

~ closing day ~

Nord Security announced on 15 October 2021 that it was taking Atlas into its portfolio, with the usual assurance that the brand would carry on independently in the freemium market. It did carry on, for about two and a half years. Then on 25 March 2024 came the notice that the service would end on 24 April, a date the company's own announcement names in capital letters as Closing Day.

The split at the end was clean and tells you what the acquisition had been about. Premium subscribers got NordVPN credentials covering the rest of whatever term they had paid for, delivered by email with a password-reset link. Free accounts were terminated outright on Closing Day with nothing offered, which is what happens when the free tier was the thing being bought in the first place.

atlasvpn.com is still answering today, two and a half years later, and it is a strange artifact. The page title in the HTML metadata still reads "Atlas VPN - Freemium VPN Service For Security Online", sitting on top of half a megabyte of the original marketing site, while the heading rendered at the top of that page says the service has been discontinued and is no longer available. Nobody deleted the sales pitch. They just put a sign in front of it.

~ why a vpn stopped being a hobby ~

In Turkey a VPN is not a privacy accessory. Wikipedia was unreachable here from April 2017 until January 2020, and in the years around that, access to one platform or another would narrow for a few days at a time with no announcement and no stated end. People kept a tunnel installed in order to read. The population of people in this country who installed a VPN client without caring at all about threat models or jurisdiction, purely because an encyclopedia had stopped loading, is very large.

Atlas arrived at the end of that particular block selling what that situation actually wants, which is an unmetered tunnel you can install on a phone without producing a card. Its own coronavirus press release made the argument out loud. The whole budget-VPN category only got big once it became useful to people who had never once thought about encryption, and five years was long enough for one of them to be bought by the market leader and switched off.

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