WeVPN

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

~ the goodbye ~

WeVPN launched in April 2020 out of the British Virgin Islands, with a CEO named Yoan Esebag and a team its own press release called VPN industry veterans. It was walking into the most crowded consumer software market there is, one where the review sites run on affiliate commissions and the established names spend more on sponsorship reads than on hardware. A newcomer gets noticed there on price or on a technical claim nobody else is making, and WeVPN tried both.

The technical story was good and specific. Bare metal servers rather than rented cloud instances, in 43 locations across 31 countries. Servers that ran entirely in RAM, so a seized machine had nothing on its disks to hand over. OpenVPN and WireGuard both supported, with Shadowsocks for places where VPN traffic itself gets blocked. A zero-log policy stated in the usual terms.

The price was the aggressive part: $2.49 a month, covering up to ten devices. Reviewers liked the speeds and the feature list and kept returning to the same two complaints, which were that it could not get past Netflix and that the Windows kill switch was unfinished. TechRadar noted something sharper in passing, that the marketing claimed over 66 locations while the server count stayed at 100-something, which is a thin fleet to spread across that many countries.

On 4 April 2023 the Archive captured the ordinary product site, selling subscriptions. By 02:27 UTC on 13 April the homepage had been replaced by a letter.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

The letter is short and does the one thing a shutdown letter is supposed to do. "We regret to inform you that due to unforeseen financial difficulties, WeVPN will no longer be able to provide our services to you." Then it names what it cannot do and what somebody else will. Windscribe had agreed to give free accounts to all WeVPN users for the remaining duration of their WeVPN subscription, and the letter sent people to windscribe.com/switch/wevpn to claim one.

It is careful about the limits of that arrangement. "Please note that by participating in this offer, you understand and accept that WeVPN will not be responsible for any other form of compensation for this inconvenience," and later, "While this is not an official partnership." Both companies said the same thing afterward: not an acquisition, not a deal, a gesture. Windscribe took on the support burden of a dead rival's customer list and got nothing for it except the customers.

~ the rival who paid for the funeral ~

That is the part worth keeping. A privacy product's death is normally a trust event, because the question everyone asks is what happened to the logs and the servers. WeVPN's answer was to send its users to the competitor best placed to judge whether its claims had ever been true, and Windscribe's answer was to honor the subscriptions. For an industry whose entire business model is a promise nobody can audit, those two moves counted for more than any transparency report either company had ever published.

The letter stayed on the homepage for three more months. The last capture is from 14 July 2023 at 15:48 UTC, and after that there is nothing at all in the Archive, which matches what subscribers described at the time: a site that was there and then was not. Today wevpn.com does not resolve on either scheme. The apology outlived the service by ninety-two days.

One thing worth saying plainly from here, since another grave on this site already covers why a tunnel stopped being optional in Turkey: the failure people prepare for is a court order or a leaked log, and what actually stranded WeVPN's subscribers was an unpaid bill. A service you have made yourself dependent on can disappear for reasons that have nothing to do with anybody's government.

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