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BulletVPN Shuts Down, Killing Lifetime Members' Subscriptions 65

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
VPN provider BulletVPN has shut down its servers with immediate effect, leaving subscribers without service regardless of their subscription terms. The company announced the closure on its website, citing "shifts in market demand, evolving technology requirements, and sustainability of operations."

Users with active subscriptions can receive a free six-month subscription to competitor Windscribe, "along with discounted long-term plans." Windscribe clarified it has not acquired BulletVPN or assumed control of its operations, and no user data including email addresses or account information was shared between the companies.
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BulletVPN Shuts Down, Killing Lifetime Members' Subscriptions More

BulletVPN Shuts Down, Killing Lifetime Members' Subscriptions

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  • Lifetime has a special meaning (Score:4, Informative)

    by Registered Coward v2 ( 447531 ) on Monday July 14, 2025 @11:28AM (#65519490)
    Clearly, lifetime plans only mean the company's lifetime; even then with bankruptcy and restructuring the company may live on while the lifetime plans die...

    • Re:Lifetime has a special meaning (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Asgard ( 60200 ) <jhmartin-s-5f7bbb@toger.us> on Monday July 14, 2025 @11:41AM (#65519548) Homepage

      Not even that, it means 'whatever we want it to mean'. Many many years ago I purchased a 'lifetime' VPN via SlashDot Deals. Come to find out 'lifetime' was defined (unwritten) by the VPN company as 5 years. The dollar value was low enough that the 5 years worked out to a trivial amount per year so I didn't come out feeling outright swindled, but I was disappointed in the marketing gymnastics just the same. The company still lives on today.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by srg33 ( 1095679 )
        Name 'em

        • VPNSecure.

          I too bought a "lifetime" VPN from them through Slashdot deals. Started off great, then one by one they shut down their nodes til only 5 eyes locations remained. By that point I'd switched to something else, but they sent out a long "woe is us" e.mail explaining why lifetime didn't mean that and if you'd be so kind as to buy it again at ~20$/year, we'd be ever so grateful.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by aitikin ( 909209 )
        Ivacy re-instated my "lifetime" plan after I bitched about it to their customer service.
      • What is your use case for a VPN? Short of using torrents and not wanting DMCA notices, or watching Netflix as if you're in Europe, my understanding is there is very minimal privacy and security advantages. But people keep buying these subscriptions based on FUD.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Asgard ( 60200 )

          This was prior to DoH / HTTPS ubiquity so public wifi hotspots still had some risk, plus it was a fun toy.

        • One use case for a VPN is allowing incoming connections to a home PC that is behind an ISP's firewall and/or NAT. Such a PC might be running a game server or a low-traffic web server. Another is connecting to the IPv6 Internet from an IPv4-only home ISP such as Frontier.

          • Most VPNs are behind NAT so anything allowing inbound is a specialty service, afaik BulletVPN never offered inbound. Of course that would introduce latency making a game server an unusual use case. Use of IPV6 on the few ISPs still not supporting is a valid use case, but a really narrow one without too many users, revenue from that is unlikely to pay for their ad campaigns. Someone technical enough to need IPV6 is also probably capable of setting up their own VPN or has access to a work VPN for this purp

        • Most home users are not seeking privacy first, it's mostly about being able to appear to be coming from other countries, or at most just hiding from their ISP who is obligated to monitor them.

          • How exactly does the ISP monitor them when most if not all typically web traffic is TLS encapsulated, and one can set DNS to 1.1.1.1 etc and use encrypted queries?

            • They don't have to monitor it they only have to capture it for LEO.

              Doesn't matter if it's encrypted or not or if you set your DNS to someone else it's still going over there network they can capture it and store it for as long as they want or until LEO asks for it. They could also man-in-the-middle it the way the telco's do with F5's but I doubt most ISP's have that kind of money outside of said telco's.

              • Aside from the enormous expense of packet capture and storing (1tb a month on my connection, costing a couple hundred in storage for the provider) making your statement completely unrealistic, what use is encrypted traffic packet captures to law enforcement? In my experience I've never seen that done, they subpoena the sites or cloud providers you use...which VPN doesn't help with. Snowden stated the NSA cannot decrypt TLS traffic so it's junk data...please enlighten us as to what you describe is even wort

                • Aside from the enormous expense of packet capture and storing (1tb a month on my connection, costing a couple hundred in storage for the provider) making your statement completely unrealistic, what use is encrypted traffic packet captures to law enforcement? In my experience I've never seen that done

                  Your experience is worthless, because it definitely happens. I have a friend who worked for an ISP in Santa Cruz who was required to not only capture traffic for several customers, but also provide it to the FBI on DVD-ROM. I would hope they use something else now. This was well after everything went SSL.

                  • Sadly you must be mistaken on your timelines...DVD ROM wasn't in use by the time the TLS (not deprecated SSL) and HSTS deployment of the Internet became fully comprehensive around 2016-2018. Before then VPNs had utility.

                    • DVD ROM wasn't in use by the time the TLS (not deprecated SSL) and HSTS deployment of the Internet became fully comprehensive

                      Did you miss the point that we're talking about the FBI? Government still does a ton of shit by fax. (e.g. see the bottom header on this page. [fbi.gov]) You clearly just don't have any idea how poorly any of this shit is run at all, or how resistant to change government is.

                    • I missed how it's even possible in the modern era to fit these packet captures on a DVD. That's 8.5 GB for a double layer. So to fit my traffic on there you'd need 118 discs....a month. So your friend was pushing thousands of DVDs a month? That took 45 mins each to burn? Or was it so long ago that the plaintext traffic compressed could fit...which would mean it was well before the comprehensive TLS deployment of the Internet, and before SSLs final deprecation in 2015? I've been occasionally respondin

                    • So to fit my traffic on there you'd need 118 discs....a month.

                      What's the relevance of your traffic?

                    • Replace my traffic with "average Internet user" and you'll get the same numbers. Now please explain how this data fit on DVDs. I think you're intentionally not answering that question because you know this is really old (I'm guessing 2004) and you're wrong about when TLS was deployed comprehensively to the Internet, making packet captures more or less useless for these investigations. Until you can answer that, you get a solid OK boomer!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by vux984 ( 928602 )

          Lots of people who travel abroad use a VPN service because various corporate sites are geoblocking countries for various b2b and other small scale portals. I see this pretty regularly.

          Lots of people who travel abroad use a VPN service for some peace of mind in sketchy internet cafes etc. It ensures you are using a known DNS provider, all your non-encrypted traffic is opaque, and you can use 'nearby' endpoints so aren't running packets around the globe.

          Another significant use for VPNs is to route around cens

          • Getting around geoblocking is a valid use case, but if it's corporate, often a company/work VPN is used. I'm specifically talking about commercial subscription VPNs sold to consumers.

            The "sketchy internet cafe" hack has been long unfeasible due to HSTS, if you want to encrypt your DNS you can just use 1.1.1.1 and manually configure DNS for free. Very little non encrypted traffic is left on the internet, you won't even list on Google if your site doesn't support TLS/HTTPS by default. There's virtually

      • > Not even that, it means 'whatever we want it to mean'.

        When I use a word, Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.

      • Not even that, it means 'whatever we want it to mean'.

        As South Park taught us. Always read the End User License Agreement. :-)

      • Name, and shame.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        Not even that, it means 'whatever we want it to mean'. Many many years ago I purchased a 'lifetime' VPN via SlashDot Deals. Come to find out 'lifetime' was defined (unwritten) by the VPN company as 5 years. The dollar value was low enough that the 5 years worked out to a trivial amount per year so I didn't come out feeling outright swindled, but I was disappointed in the marketing gymnastics just the same. The company still lives on today.

        This is why most countries have advertising standards that give legal meanings to words like "lifetime" or "unlimited". Advertisers love words that have no meaning or very ambiguous meanings like "organic" (anything that contains organic molecules). This is why multi-vitamin ads concentrate on words like "wellness" and "feeling" rather than pretend there is a tangible health benefit, it's specifically avoids saying there is a tangible health benefit because they want to give the impression of doing somethin

    • Clearly, lifetime plans only mean the company's lifetime; even then with bankruptcy and restructuring the company may live on while the lifetime plans die...

      You sound like a creditor calling the child of a recently deceased person asking to paid for the chocolate pudding you delivered to the recently deceased a month before they died. They are dead, let it go. That is a risk of commerce and 'credit'.

      • Clearly, lifetime plans only mean the company's lifetime; even then with bankruptcy and restructuring the company may live on while the lifetime plans die...

        You sound like a creditor calling the child of a recently deceased person asking to paid for the chocolate pudding you delivered to the recently deceased a month before they died. They are dead, let it go. That is a risk of commerce and 'credit'.

        I had one call about a dead relative and simply explained they would not be getting paid. A friend, OTOH, had a hell of a time cancelling cable becasue they needed to talk to the person on the account, who was dead. I suggested he simply not pay it, they'll eventually figure it out.

  • The term "lifetime" in a lifetime subscription or warranty always refers to the lifetime of the company issuing it, not the lifetime of the customer.
    • A lifetime guarantee refers to the life of the product. I.e. a pair of waterproof shoes with lifetime guarantee, are guaranteed to be waterproof until they have a hole. In general guarantees only guarantee that the product is free from fabrication defects and will keep working as advertised during its lifetime.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by aitikin ( 909209 )

        A lifetime warranty refers to the life of the product. I.e. a pair of waterproof shoes with lifetime warranty, are warrantied to be waterproof until they have a hole.

        FTFY. Guarantees legally have a different meaning than warranties. If my company offers a guarantee on a product and anything goes wrong, they have to repair/replace. If we only offer a warranty on the product, we warrant it against defects for that timeframe.

        Interestingly to me, my understanding was that lifetime warranty/guarantee/support had legally-binding requirements that companies had to set aside certain amounts of capital to legally claim. It's partially why my company trained me to say, "Unlim

  • Entirely unsurprising (Score:5, Interesting)

    by TWX ( 665546 ) on Monday July 14, 2025 @11:54AM (#65519586)

    When I had to drive to a particular part of town every now and then I'd use the carwash near my destination since they did a decent job and weren't overpriced. They always offered lifetime car washes as a rather expensive package.

    Last time I was there they were still offering those expensive lifetime packages. Next time after that I was in that part of town, perhaps three weeks later, the carwash was fenced-off with rental chain-link fencing. When I drove past a month later the carwash wasn't only torn-down, but a crew was pouring a new foundation for an apartment complex.

    Given the amount of time it takes to go through the permitting process for such construction, they would've known for well over a year before that the place was closing. They probably sold the land and worked out an agreement with the buyer to continue running the carwash until the buyer was ready to start construction.

    I'm not inclined to purchase 'lifetime' anything unless my fairly short-term usage is going to be enough to offset it, because you never know for how long the place will be there, even if they are honest and attempting to keep operations running in perpetuity.

    • They did honor the deal for the lifetime of the car wash. Were you expecting something different?

      Anyone who hasn't figured out that "lifetime" belongs in the same pile of terms as "unlimited" and similar marketing ilk has earned themselves the experience of learning a valuable life lesson.

      • Actually that would be fraudulent contract since the terms under the contract were tied to information that one party could not possibly know. It's the same with knowingly selling a defective or stolen product. You are liable for this. The only issue here is that there's no entity left to sue - but in theory if this was proven to be a wide spread fraud the directors of the company could be barred from starting a new business in certain jurisdictions.

    • So you're saying that offering a "lifetime" product causes the land to be sold and the business to be moved? Thanks Egon!

  • As many have stated, "lifetime" services often refer to the lifetime of the provider. This looks like a classic "pump and dump", as they saw their profits crest they closed the doors.

  • Tomorrow we'll see ads for MissileVPN offering lifetime subscriptions for only 20% more than BulletVPN used to offer.

  • Lifetime in the cloud means nothing when the wind can simply blow it away. There is no such thing as "ownership" or "lifetime" when the cloud is involved.

  • BulletVPN was owned by Nixworks OU, a company based in Tallinn, Estonia. Ali Jawad is identified as the CEO.

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