So I was just renewing a contract with a VPN provider, and paid out for a couple years it works out to somewhere under $2/month.
ISPs around me can run from about $50-$150/month
If I’m putting the major bulk of my traffic over a tunnel that could eat up a sizable chunk of a given connection point for the provider that I’m sure costs more than $2/month to maintain. I would have to assume it would take the combined subscriptions of several users to pay for a given node.
So how does that work as a business model? Unless these VPN providers are getting a steal on their connections it’s hard to envision how they can manage to pay their costs without these nodes being absolutely bottlenecked when a few people start streaming some shows.
If you are in the United States, ISPs are largely unregulated and charge whatever the fuck they want. They make ridiculous profits.
Many other developed countries have dramatically cheaper internet access with significantly higher speeds.
For you to have fast internet, someone had to lay out the cable from their comm centers to your house. They can still be overpriced, but they have a lot of infrastructure that VPN providers get to use for free.