[vinay_ys]

Even with an honest company, the pressures on them are twofold – security and legal. Their systems can be compromised through security vulnerabilities and social engineering (including coercion – money, ideology, compromise, ego – classic psyops playbook). Or they can get legal government orders - which pretty much every government in the world have laws on books and operational practices to force any actor to hand-over data in the name of fighting money laundering and terrorism (AML/CFT). It is very expensive to put up strong defenses against these. I don't see a viable business model charging $5/month that covers regular operational expenses and covers these types of events.

Edit: Forgot to mention backdoors built into basic technologies they may already be using – like the Cavium HSM thing that came to light earlier this week.

[ehhthing]

You know at that point why not just hack Level3, Cogent, Telia, Zayo or some other T1 provider?

Frankly VPNs don't protect you from anything other than the most monitoring systems and the occasional public wifi connection. They're really just glorified Netflix region proxies and nothing more to most people