Because it’s mostly brand recognition that lends security products an aura of trustworthiness, and that involved a high ad spend with an advantage towards established brands.
There are cheap and even free VPNs. If your ad can convert customers who aren’t going to comparison shop, you don’t need to be offering the lowest price.
Any idea why there hasn’t been much if any enforcement from the FTC and co about the sketchy VPN review blogs? Seems like especially Lina Khan’s FTC would be interested to find a way, because giving the impression of an independent review and then adding a little “actually we’re extremely biased” disclaimer somewhere doesn’t seem like it should be acceptable. They might be offshore, but they do plenty of business with US creators.
I think GP was probably exaggerating but there are far fewer owning companies than actual vpns. This article does a decent job of showing it https://vpnpro.com/blog/hidden-vpn-owners-unveiled-97-vpns-2... but may be a bit out of date now (Oct 24). I believe it, or a similar one, made the rounds on HN a year or so ago.
That website is owned by a VPN company iirc, specifically NordVPN or at least they astroturf for them. Note that on the side there is 1 & 2 VPNs and they're NordVPN and Surfshark which have the same parent relationship as they merged. That's the thing though it makes it look like there's more than one as opposed to just slapping a NordVPN ad there. Illusion of choice.
And no they're not exaggerating, have a look at the two companies I mentioned and how many "brands" they own.
Few people decide between "security products" based on price, they do it mainly based on reputation. Buying that reputation through ads is expensive, so you can't go too low in price. Also, there are super low-cost VPNs out there, but they're a separate market segment and we don't usually hear about them because they don't have the money to advertise in large media outlets.
Or maybe just different marketing strategy eg Nord costs more to begin with, and then they use "promo" deals with offer huge discounts resulting in a normal price again.