Somagu, VPN Jantit, VPS1Dollar: what a dollar a month of VPN actually buys
Someone sent me four options for changing your IP at around a dollar a month. I checked each one before spending anything, and the checking turned out to be the useful part.
Somagu: real, and it has been around. A NAT based KVM box in South Korea, run alongside the Mudfish service, with a one click OpenVPN plan that configures itself. The sub dollar monthly figure I was handed I could not confirm: a public listing for the same 512 MB box shows several dollars a month. What is real is that it bills hourly, so connecting for a few hours a month genuinely costs pennies. That is a different claim from a dollar a month and a better one for occasional use.
VPN Jantit: real, running since 2016, dozens of countries including an Istanbul endpoint on ports 992 and 1194. But it is not a dollar, it is free, with accounts that expire after seven days. Free and shared is the actual product.
VPS1Dollar: the offer page is real, a one dollar VPS in France with 1 vCPU and 1 GB. The domain is only a few months old and the ownership is hidden, which is what the automated reputation scanners are reacting to. I would not pay a year up front for that.
VPN Club: sold to me as a dollar with OpenVPN, WireGuard and IKEv2. I could not find it anywhere at all. That is its own answer.
The split that matters is not the price. A shared account means you do not know who runs the exit or what it logs. Your own WireGuard or OpenVPN box means you do know, and the IP is yours alone.
@chalk_stream · 2w ago · 5 replies
If the goal is only to change your IP and come out in another country, I would skip the ready made VPN entirely and put WireGuard or OpenVPN on a one dollar VPS yourself. The IP is then yours, nobody else is on it, and you can move the server whenever you want. And if the actual requirement is ten or twenty different IPs at a dollar each, ready made VPN accounts are the wrong shape altogether, there are VPS and IP providers built for that.
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@north_pier · 2w ago
The other thing your own box gets you is that it stops being a subscription you forget about. A dollar a month to a company you cannot identify is how people end up with a card charge in year three.
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@quiet_carriage · 2w ago · 3 replies
Worth being precise about what that buys, because it is the opposite of what people assume. A VPS only you use is the worst anonymity set there is: one IP, one person, every packet attributable. You have swapped a crowded exit for a private one and privacy works the other way round.
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@chalk_stream · 2w ago
Yes, and those are two different jobs. Changing your IP is not anonymity. If the requirement is a Korean address or a Turkish one, your own box is strictly better. If the requirement is that nobody can tie the traffic to you, it is strictly worse.
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@damp_cellar · 2w ago
That distinction should probably be the first line of the post rather than the last one. Most people asking for a cheap VPN cannot say which of the two they want.
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