Windscribe Turned 10!!!1!!

Ten years ago, on April 20, 2016, a few pals with poor impulse control and an even poorer sense of fashion, released a VPN into the world. It was called Windscribe because one of the founders farted while someone was writing down some notes, and honestly that origin story has never stopped being accurate.

We had no venture capital. No office. No business plan that would survive contact with a single adult human (except maybe the CEO of SoftBank... he'll fund literally anything). What we did have was a singular, unwavering mission:

Protect your entire ass on the internet. Not just the cheek. Not just the meat. The whole damn thing.

Ten years later, the mission hasn't changed. The ass remains fully protected.

Ten Years Is a Long Time to Not Sell Out

Let's put a decade in perspective. In 2016, people were still listening to Drake and letting shit slide. You could buy a house with actual physical money. The word "unprecedented" hadn't been ruined yet.

Since then, VPN companies have been bought, sold, bundled, flipped, merged into conglomerates, and quietly absorbed by intelligence companies wearing a trench coat. Some just evaporated. Remember WeVPN? They collapsed and we adopted their orphaned users like stray cats because we felt bad. And also because we love cats.

Meanwhile, Windscribe has been acquired by exactly nobody. We have zero investors. No board members telling us what to do, no shareholders to appease with r/fellowkids marketing plans. We’re the same small rag-tag group of moose-worshipping Canadian weirdos we were in 2016. Except now we have way more servers, even way more-er users, and an exquisite coffee machine that has 28 indivudual drink settings. We upgraded from brewing parking lot gravel to actual coffee beans. You'll also be happy to know that we no longer pay our staff in Cheerios and promises to go to Disneyland - cash only baby! Growth!

The Stuff That Actually Matters

We're not going to bore you with a feature-by-feature product tour. You either use Windscribe and already know, or you don't and there's a download button somewhere on this page. But a few tasty morsels from the last decade are worth mentioning because they're either subjectively hilarious or objectively important:

We won a court case by having nothing to show. Someone in Greece dragged us into an EU court demanding our logs. The legal battle lasted two years. We showed up, said "we don't have logs, except the ones we just made in the toilet," proved it, and the case was dismissed. Most companies say "no logs" on their website. We said it under oath to a judge. Different energy.

A government seized our server and found it empty. Dutch authorities physically took one of our servers. It was running on RAM only. No disks. No persistence. They booted it up and found the digital equivalent of the inside of Kim Kardashians head: emptiness. We would have paid to see their faces, but they don’t accept FuttBux as legal tender. Jerks. 

We don't know your password. We hash your credentials before they ever touch our systems. We literally cannot look up your password if we wanted to. If you forget it, that's between you and your god(s).

You don't even have to tell us your name. Sign up with a username. Or use a hashed login. No email required. Pay with crypto if you're feeling spicy. We have users we genuinely could not identify if someone put a gun to our heads. That's not a bug. That's the whole point.

We publish every law enforcement request in real time. Not an annual PDF. Not a vague transparency "report" that says "we received some requests and declined most of them, trust us brochacho." A live, updated feed. Every DMCA notice. Every law enforcement inquiry. Right there. All the time.

We open-sourced our apps. Desktop, Android, browser extensions. Everything’s on GitHub. Because "just trust us" is not a security policy and we're not afraid of people looking under our clothes at our soft, supple, naked code. In fact, we want you to. Do it. DO IT RIGHT NOW WE DARE YOU.

We named our blocking engine R.O.B.E.R.T. Because every good piece of infrastructure deserves a human name. R.O.B.E.R.T. blocks trackers, malware, ads, and whatever else you point it at. Server-side. No client software needed. R.O.B.E.R.T. never complains. R.O.B.E.R.T. never calls in sick. R.O.B.E.R.T. is the coworker we all wish we had.

10 Years By the Numbers

100,000,000+ users. That's roughly the population of Germany. An entire Germany's worth of people decided not to hand their browsing data to Mark Zuckerberg! We're proud of every single one of you.

70+ countries with bare-metal servers. No virtual locations. Actual hardware in actual racks in actual cities. We have servers in more countries than most people can name.

10 years without a single dollar of outside funding. Our only investor is the "buy Windscribe Pro" button on our website. That's it. That's the whole business model. You pay us. We protect your ass. No middleman. No ulterior motives. No quarterly earnings call where we explain to shareholders why "user privacy" is a growth vector.

ZERO logs. Always. Famously. Legally. Provably. Sensually?

The Sappy Part (You Knew It Was Coming)

Ten years of building this company only works because of one group of people: you.

Not the corporate "you" that brands deploy in marketing copy to simulate human warmth. Actually you. The person reading this at work right now. The person who signed up with just a username because they liked that we didn't demand an email, a phone number, a blood sample, a butthole-scan and their mother's maiden name. The person in our Discord at 2 AM helping a stranger troubleshoot a WireGuard config. The person in a country where the internet is censored and a VPN isn't a luxury, it's a lifeline.

You picked the wild and whacky independent Canadian VPN over the ones with the Super Bowl ads and the YouTuber sponsorships and the "SMASH MY LINK FOR 80% OFF" promo codes. You chose the company that names things R.O.B.E.R.T., forgets what the acronym actually stands for, and writes blog posts like this one.

We don't take that for granted. Not ever, not even for a second.

When we were three people in 2016, we imagined maybe a few thousand users would care about what we were building. Now there are 100 million of you and we still operate with the same philosophy: build good things, don't be dingleberries, protect your buttcheeks. And that is never changing.

What's Next?

We're not going anywhere. 

We're going to keep doing exactly what we've been doing: building privacy tools for people who give a shit, publishing everything we can, and writing blog posts that our legal team wishes we'd run by them first.

Our philosophy has always been and will always be that access to information and communication without interference is a fundamental, and global, human right. We don't care which country you are from, we don't care what your belief system is, we don't care who you choose to love. We only care about your privacy and your ability to access information. We're willing to die for that (if the NSA is reading this blog, tell the CIA & MOSSAD to at least make it a quick death, and avoid damaging our faces - we're too beautiful for closed caskets. Also, fuck you guys. That's from the heart).

Here's to another decade of keeping the internet free, open, and slightly less terrible.

Happy birthday to us. And thank you for being here for the ride.

Love, always,

Team Windscribe