How the World’s #1 VPN App Reached 1 Billion Downloads – Tanuj Chatterjee, Super Unlimited

0:00If you search for VPN, it's the number one app on the App Store. At this time, we get over a million downloads a day. Most of them are organic. Cumulatively, we have crossed well over a billion downloads. It's also a category where the whole pie is increasing in size, and our slice of the pie as a percentage is

0:19also increasing. Hello, I'm your host David Bernard, and with me today, RevenueCat CEO Jacob Biting. Our guest today is Tanay Chaterjee, CEO at Super Unlimited VPN. On the podcast, I talked with Tanay about the product-driven growth loop behind the number one VPN app in the world. Why they intentionally leave money on the table, and how the prettiest design often loses in their AB tests. Hey Tanay, thanks so

0:46much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. I said joining me, but it's joining us. Jacob, nice to have you here today as well. I'm just here David, I'm here to bring what I can, interject, you know, philosophy as needed, but I'm excited to be here. We had a a lively conversation before hitting record. So, one of these days we'll have a Sub Club After Hours talk about life and business and everything else. But, I wanted to kick it off today talking about your app Super Unlimited, and I did not know, kind of embarrassed to say this, but I had not heard of it until you and I met

1:21at an App Growth Summit, and I looked it up and was like, holy crap, this is the number one result for VPN, and just incredibly successful app. So, as we get started, I wanted to give you an opportunity to just talk a little bit about the app and kind of the success it's had to help people understand and

1:37kind of frame the conversation. Yeah, sure. So, thank you for the for the kind words. If you search for VPN, it's the number one app on the App Store in the productivity category before all the chat GPT kind of clones they came in, we were always on the top 10 along with Google. The only other products were from Microsoft and Google. So, proud of what we have done over the four five years. It's a as we talked through the podcast we you'll you'll see it's a

2:03lot of it is very product driven growth. But at this time we get over a million downloads a day. Most of them are organic. We have received cumulatively we have crossed well over a billion downloads. It's also a category where the whole pie is increasing in size and our slice of the pie as a percentage is also increasing in size. So, we're we

2:26are we are we are in a good spot there. Yes, we we have not done too much PR marketing branding yet, but that will that will come over time. A million downloads a day, that's like almost an unfathomable number. I don't even know after they're still getting a million downloads a day except for when they like go viral or you know, ChatGPT I'm sure had a few days like that, maybe a few million. That is just an insane number. And then you said most of that is organic. So, that I wanted to jump to that next. How did you end up at the top result for VPN and and how do

2:57you defend that? Yeah, you know, we didn't start being on top we didn't we didn't start trying out to be the biggest VPN, right? We we we basically my background just FYI is engineering and product. Before getting into the VPN world I was CTO at Rakuten where we grew the company from, you know, $30 million in revenue to billion dollars in revenue in the US. A lot of lessons learned around the consumer DNA then and my given my background I think very bottom up rather than marketing down. Sometimes to a fault, but it has served us well. So, you know, we basically looked at the app started

3:33looking at the reviews right away. Started looking at our competitors reviews right away to see what's missing in our app. Not in terms of feature functionality, but but what are people complaining about? And we started fixing those things. We started removing friction. And then we started reading the competitors reviews in in terms of what are their challenges over there that we can fix and resolve. We basically built an app which was very very high quality. I say to people sometimes that if VPN apps are commodity as as you know, right? It's very easy open source codes galore in the internet. So you can find and build a

4:06VPN app in two weeks. The first 85% is very easy. But the after that every 1% is hard work. You know, how do I connect a user who's in Poland to the best server? What's the right server? What's the right protocol? Uh and then there are blocking and tackling that we'll have to do, you know, some people will might might block you because an airline might might block you thinking that oh you might be a bot. How do I give them very very good service quality? That's really hard work. So that's what we focused on a lot. It's a premium app

4:36that helps because there's no friction. You just come in uh no login, no hard very very heavy paywalls that are hard to get around. You just start click on connect and start using it, right? Our engagement time is literally, you know, half a second half a minute. The first time they come in they'll have to do a very quick setup. And after but this is second time they come in they come in and they click on the connect button they go off to their Netflix or to their browsers and all, right? And that's what we want. We don't want people to stick around too long. Unlike a lot of other

5:04apps where engagement We define engagement differently. We it's not time spent on the app. It's actually the intention to come back to the app. And it seems like that is kind of is kind of feeding the algorithm, right? It's like people download the app and then it's so easy to use. You get these massive downloads and then that just keeps like this perpetuating cycle. Are there any like specific things you've done and experimented with? Like, you know, I know Ariel at Appfigures talks a lot about rating velocity. You know, have you moved the rating prompt earlier or later and like seen moves at all in

5:38your ASO? Yeah, you know, ratings are super important, right? But there's a time when to ask for ratings. You can't ask ask it too many times and too often and at the wrong time mainly, right? We basically ask for ratings after we've delivered value to the user. That multiplied by the number of downloads, the number of users who are coming in and using the app and and coming back, that helps overall. So yeah, so rating is important, very important to us. When people come in and look at the App Store, not only we are number one, but they also see two 2 million plus, you know, very high quality ratings. That

6:12definitely is is impactful, but we we don't try to do too much gymnastics with trying to get more ratings. I think they they come organically, they come we ask for them. But we don't overdo it. Speaking of not doing too many gymnastics, your screenshots don't seem especially fancy, you know, there's a lot of trends in screenshot design now of like bigger text and gradients and span two screenshots with the device image, but I looked at yours and they're

6:40like pretty simple and straightforward. The biggest thing I noticed was that you use logos like HBO and Netflix and so you're kind of telling people get get access to these services no matter where you are. But is that intentional? Any any lessons for you on screenshots? Like have they just not mattered? Have you

6:56experimented at all with them? Yeah, screenshots has been our biggest mystery for us. So we have tried. So of course for different regions and all we try different screenshots, localization and whatnot that everybody does, but our screenshots, you know, and you've been very polite, you know, they're they're a bit stale. They look a little stale. And we have tried modernizing screenshots and I have to say 80% of the time when we do AB tests, they lose. And it was like, "Huh." You know, people just like to see what they were used to seeing. So in many cases we have gone back to the original ones that we had. In some

7:29cases, like I said, 20% of the cases they do work slightly, but we have not seen any meaningful difference when we experimented with screenshots. We also don't, you you because we we are, you know, number one on the SO, we we also don't do massive changes at the same, you know, because it it's very risky. So, we we we've done tweaks. We have done new screenshots. We've done AB tests. We've changed the colors. We've changed what the content. We've done all of those things in a very organized methodical way, but most of them have not produced results that we were expecting. Although, you would think that they are better and more modern and

8:07it should be more compelling in 2026, but it doesn't work. So, again, I think the data is proving us wrong, which is fine. It is It is what it the truth is, right? Yeah, I I just got done with a live YouTube paywall race. So, we spent an hour on the Sub Club YouTube channel live racing paywalls. And one of the things we talked about was like, you sometimes, you know, quote-unquote, I don't don't don't don't mean to be disparaging of your screenshots. I don't think they're ugly, but sometimes they're like super fancy design just doesn't perform as well. And I I don't understand it. Like, you know, my bent

8:42is always like make things prettier. I don't understand why It's not that the uh It's not that the technical elite have some sort of like uh out of step actual understanding of what people want or like. No, it's not that. It's that people have no taste, David. People have no taste. Well, next I wanted to dig into SEO cuz it's something I I've I've had so many people I mean, maybe less so the last year. Like, now it's more about LLM optimization, but so many people over the years have asked about breaking into SEO. And I know it's something a project y'all worked on. What are your lessons

9:17from there? And then to tack on to that, have you seen the work you did do in SEO start to pay off in showing up in LLM responses? Let me go back a little bit. So, till beginning of last year, we were only a mobile app. We were just a one-page site because there was no need for it. So, right? So, last year, late last year, we launched our Windows product. And it to get ready for that, uh we had to build

9:41start building a web presence, right? SEO takes time, right? So, we said, "In 2025, where do we start?" So, what we did was we started with programmatic content. So, we worked with this company called Daydream. The founder I knew the founder from before. He had actually worked in the VPN space before, so he already knew the domain. So, I said,

10:00"Okay, let's let's help help me out." So, yeah, so we started seeing results there, but the conversion was still not that great. So, we it's still a work in progress for us. It's still early. I'm not an expert there. I know SEO in general has suffered. Every consumer company that's relies on the web traffic is suffering a little bit. Both SEO is down a little bit because, you know, the first results that you see are Gemini and whatnot in Google, as well as uh even paid search marketing is is less effective because the the real estate is gone. Part of the real estate for the first page is gone because Gemini takes

10:34it over. So, a lot of people are struggling. So, I don't think we we will spend time on SEO, but we won't over index on SEO. I think one of the our biggest channels for growth, even to send them to make them start using Windows, is through our big mobile user base, right? So, we'll spend a lot of

10:53time on product marketing within mobile. SEO, we know will it'll take time. We are still working on it. We have content people. We have SEO people, but we are that's not the top channel for us. It is funny because I read their case study about this and it's doing like 1,600 app downloads per month, which for

11:11at your scale, that's just such peanuts. But for a lot of apps, that would be a pretty meaningful improvement to downloads. So, it's it's all about scale there. But I did want to follow up with that last point about LLMs. Have you found that because of the SEO efforts that you've put in, have you started showing up higher or what's your your LLM I I forget what it What's Either of you know the What's the LLM term for

11:35SEO? GEO, right? Generative engine optimization. It's It used to be like LEO, or but that's lower orbit, so it's like I You know, I was It's interesting you asked. I was looking at Google Analytics the other day on for our web. There is traffic coming in. There are downloads coming in from there. It's not in the top five channels, but it is coming. So, it's it's a good sign that we are

11:55starting to get more visibility. interesting. I think it's we see so much higher on the like dev tool side, but it makes sense. I feel like choosing a VPN is a Like you know exactly what you're going for at that point, you know, versus like I just my naivety about the VPN market, but it's like I don't I don't suppose people are being like, "How do I tunnel my tra- You know what I mean?" They know they need a VPN cuz somebody told them like if you want to do this, you need a VPN, right? And so

12:18they should search those three letters. Yeah, and also I would say there are bigger VPN players out there, not in bigger in terms of downloads, but there are, you know, a couple you know, few VPN players who are premium only, while we are freemium. So, their downloads are smaller, but their LTVs are much bigger. And they came in from the desktop side of things. And they've spent years focusing on SEO. So, if you're looking for, "Oh, you know, I'm in Bolivia and where do I watch the Winter Olympics right now?" I'm I bet you that you'll

12:44find a website from them. Even on consumer, cuz I was like I say, VPN market's really funny cuz things like Tailscale and Citrix are like also in the VPN market, but don't feel like direct competitors to you, right? No. Some of them are, you know, more more catering to the B2B to C side side, right? And we are we are purely consumer

13:01play, yeah. I did want to dive a little deeper into the freemium side of things, cuz it does seem like this is a big part of your growth engine is having that freemium tier, which allows you to get so many downloads and so many ratings, which then gets more downloads. How have you balanced the monetization? And then as a VPN, how do you manage costs for those

13:19free users? Our free to paid conversion is quite low, and I'm okay with it because we have focused on the top of the funnel a lot. I There are a lot of companies, smaller competitors in the premium world, who would try to be get more aggressive in monetization, and I think that's not our philosophy, right? We want to give you a very, very, very, very good quality free product. And the reason it's low, not because the product sucks, is because our free version is that good. So, there are you don't want to throttle or take things away from the free version like like There's a reason we have the word

13:56unlimited in our name, where if if you want to come and you can't pay, that's that's fine, you know, you probably just will have to watch an ad or two, and then you can use it unlimited. We have, you know, dozens and dozens of countries and cities that you can connect to just fine. I would rather give people more value before asking them for more money, because So, it's a denominator game, right? So, part of the reason you you also alluded to before that you you know, your most of the users are organic. Partly because we are it's a numbers game for us. Our LTV, because

14:26it's premium, because of a big majority of the users are are premium, our LTV is not that high. We can't compete with Spotifys of the world, where, you know, where their LTV and and retention is amazingly high. But we are adding a lot more now. Talking about adding more value, we we are we are adding Windows, so not only you can protect your mobile phone, but you can protect all your all of your devices, Windows, Mac, mobile phones across the family. We talked about, you know, adding a second phone number app, so we can throw it in the bundle. I think that's what That's where we're going. But the main thing is

14:59our top of the funnel is our superpower. Don't mess with it. Give people a fantastic free VPN experience. So, do you manage the ad revenue to break even on the free users, or do you even lose a little money on the free users? And and how do you make money on ads? Are there Are they full-screen interstitials? Do those pay reasonably well? Like Do they get it injected into your web

15:20pages? No, no. So, you know, it's limited, right? So, I mentioned our our average engagement time is 30 seconds on the app or less. So, you don't have much of a window to show an ad. So, you're to your point, yes, we have interstitials and we have full-screen ads and we have some native banners and all, but we don't try

15:38to optimize it for traffic necessarily. Some countries, you know, high rev countries, US, Western Europe and all, you know, they're profitable and in some in some cases, you know, the match rates are low, the CPMs are very low. It's totally okay with us. So, I came from the e-commerce world, right? We used to get spikes on Valentine's Day and, you know, Mother's Day and Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Our spikes usually happen because of geopolitical issues. So, I'll give you an example, like I think was it it was last year, Turkey banned Instagram for 11 days and we got 15 million downloads in 4 days. And the I

16:10mean, if you think of Turkey's population, it's 85 million. And, you know, if you think of 15 million downloads and think of the internet population using it, it's probably 30 to 40%, right? So, do we make that much money in Turkey? Probably not. I mean, there are countries where there are more issues that are poorer, Myanmar, for example, right? They having a civil war, but we just think it's the right thing to do. People should have access to information. People should access to free information. Uh they should not be constrained by just propaganda. So, we just provide service uh even if we lose money. As long as yes, we are running a

16:44business, we but we we are not trying to over-optimize this, right? Are you on ads? Do you defer showing ads until like you've determined somebody's like not a likely purchaser? Do you have any orchestration between like showing ads versus not and stuff like that or or are you thinking about it that granularly yet? For the first download, if you just installed it, we don't show an ad right

17:05away, right? So, yes, I guess is the answer. It's like you do some sort of smart and be like, okay, we're going to defer to see if this person's going to they might convert right away and we don't want to degrade the experience. It's not just for conversion. It's also, you know, we want them to see the value of the app, right? So, even the paywalls are not very hard. There's a big X sign

17:20where you can cancel out very easily. So, we we're not trying to over monetize it. Just the main goal is come and use the product. Yeah, I guess like becoming their VPN app is probably more important than monetizing on that. Money will come. Money will come, right? Everything else will it will come. It sounds like part of how you manage this is just to keep costs really low so that you're not bleeding out by serving all of these freemium users. Any any lessons there about just keeping costs This is my naivete on on VPNs, but but you all have to maintain that tunneling infrastructure, right? Or do you rent

17:53that out from somebody? No, we we maintain it. Yeah, we spend So, David, you're right. Managing the cost is key, but not at the cost of service quality. So, every data packet for a VPN goes through our servers, right? So, if people in Turkey or you know, some of the lower revenue countries, if they're using it, sometimes you lose out, too. And it's okay. It's it's okay with us. What we can control a little more or what we want to control is marketing costs, right? That's why we we spend money in marketing and we will continue spending more, but that's where we can control things. We won't make any compromises on

18:29service quality. So, then I mean, you're business, how do you make money? Like what what are the features that you put behind the paywall? Like how do you entice people to actually subscribe when you do provide such a fantastic freemium product? The extra value that we can provide with with a paid product is of course no ads, top tier customer support, but also a lot more locations and access to higher 10G servers and whatnot, right? But now, starting late last year, multi-platform, where, you know, once you subscribe, you

19:02can use the VPN for all the platforms. So, we're upping the value game. That's how we make money. We By the way, we're growing very nicely. We're very profitable. The investors are not pushing me otherwise, so it's a good position to be in. Yeah, what an incredible position to be in. I mean, the the deeper we get into this conversation, it sounds like there is so much dry powder with a billion downloads and so such a huge premium base that as you do find secondary product market fit, find new features to add, things like that, you've got so much dry powder to really build the

19:35business over time. Yeah, yeah, we we looking at long-term, right? Because because we are unlike some of the other VPN companies that are that are for desktop first, some of the bigger competitors that we have. We are mobile first, right? And so one of the apps we recently launched and we are cleaning it up and all before bundling it or promoting it heavy heavily is this eSIM app. So think of think of this, right? So a lot of VPN user that we have, think of the cohorts, right? There's a lot of people who are travelers. They just travel to Europe, but they cannot access their favorite

20:05content or they cannot access their bank and all, right? Or immigrants that want to watch a show, like a Korean immigrant in the US, they wanted to watch a Korean show and whatnot. So there's a lot of access-based issues that happen once you cross the borders, right? We think eSIM is a fantastic market and intersects

20:22very well with our user base, right? Just last year, 500 million people traveled to Europe. If you think of it, it's a very big part of the affluent global population who can afford to travel to Europe. Are there a lot of these people who are using our VPN products? Yes. Do they need eSIMs? Yes. I went to those in Europe last week and I used for the first time I did it and like it's I mean, compared to like the pay $10 a day, get ripped off, slow access, it was pretty good. I paid $20 for the whole week. I had like first party a pretty decent access. It wasn't

20:52perfect, but it was like pretty decent and I didn't have to worry about and it like you didn't have to you don't have to go to a a shady shop and get a card to slide into your phone. It's like it's it's pretty cool and I'll tell you I think there's opportunity in the market because the the two like I I to use the names you've heard of. The first one like their website didn't even work on mobile. It's so bad. Which I was like, seems like this should probably work. I think it failed because I was on my phone on bad service, which I'm like,

21:16pretty sure that's a test case you should probably have nailed. It's like your website shouldn't require JavaScript and be like so crazy. Uh but anyway, I think I mean, I buy it. I think that's a great strategic direction. Think of other values. So, we have this massive customer base. What else will they value? It's not what else can I sell to them, right? I don't even need to sell, right? Here's what we have, you know, do you want to use it? And they're privacy conscious users, they're access conscious users. I think there's a with a large denominator, even a small change in the in the multiple of conversions

21:48will help a lot. Your your denominator at a billion downloads or is the magnitude larger than most denominators in the subscription app space? I mean, it's a tough challenge. I mean, it's a a blessing and a curse cuz once you're at those mega num- I mean, I guess if you're playing at like a like a flywheel game, right? Where you're taking the current volume and you're adding new things. Like that's fun, right? I think once you get to that scale, it's kind of can be kind of demoralizing cuz you're like, well,

22:11there's just no more people. You know? Like That's the part of it. The downside of being the number one is where will the future growth come from for the for the top of the funnel, right? Return on At the end of the day, it's return on capital, right? Like where's it coming from? You know? It's a it's a very first world problem to have, but it is a problem

22:28nevertheless. So, you mentioned earlier, we you know, we focused a lot on the organic side of things, but you mentioned that you do do some marketing and it's something that it sounds like you're maybe you're looking to do more of so more people are aware of it. to say if you start selling eSIMs, you're going to need to get to know some ad buyers in airports, you know? Like

22:45it's a very like on prem advertising. We are also learning, right? So, Ethan was like, okay, you know, we have so many users. Just join an ad. Let's see how it goes. And unless people are traveling, there's no intent. I mean, why would you buy an eSIM right now, right? So, it's like, okay, good to know. I mean, come summer or before summer, came your presence promotions at the right time. Not every phone is eSIM compatible either, right? Do we again, do we not bombard people with an eSIM ad? Just be very deliberate about who we want to show it to, who will actually get value out of it, right? So, the ads

23:17is another one of those things you talked about ads, right? I would rather leave 10% money on the table rather than bombard people with that. There's a lot of trust that you destroy with overdoing monetization. And back to like um growth side of things, what have you done in paid marketing or has it almost been

23:33completely organic? Well, Apple and Google, you know, it's uh for for search ads, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Have you found the brand defense especially important or or like what wins have you found on search ads when you're already the number one result? Well, number one result on VPN, right? There are other keywords in there, too. Sometimes you also do it for brand defense, like you mentioned. There are other keywords, you know, we focus on specific keywords, specific markets where we where we spend dollars on and we look into the ROAS very carefully and you can't go beyond a certain amount. We also see sometimes these some of these

24:10ads will cannibalize our organic channels anyway, so there's always that risk, but it's okay, right? So, so we we're trying to manage it carefully. It's fascinating your scale that you do spend on that and then philosophically you're still trying to get a return on ad spend. You're still like penciling it out versus just like trying to be everywhere because you already are everywhere with that number one placement, so Five years ago, we were not number one everywhere, right? We were probably number one in a couple of locations in iOS. Now, we we track 71 countries and right now for the VPN keyword, we are number one in 67 of those, right? And

24:46number two in in the rest. In Android, we are not as successful. We are number one in the US right now. We are in the top five or top 10 almost everywhere, but it's not that we are number one everywhere, right? So, we do see that as an opportunity. It's like glass half full or glass half empty, right? Okay, where can I use some extra marketing push to kind of get up there because I

25:07think the brand definitely helps. I wanted to transition and talk about some of your product-driven approach to growth. And one of the things I found fascinating was that you put your support team inside the product team. How do How does that work? The head of support reports to the head of product. I want a mirror in front of

25:25the product team right there, right? It's not Our growth comes from product decisions and not just from marketing campaigns. Sometimes we know that what are people struggling with? What's not clear? What are people asking about over and over? So, that could be a UX issue, that could be a communication issue, or an education issue, or an or onboarding issue. Service quality. Ah, you know, I'm in Uganda and I'm starting to see a lot of service quality tickets, you know, product should know first right away. I have been at companies where, you know, product and support was a totally separate organization and support will talk do a do a talk once a

26:01month and show their KPIs and how many tickets they've solved. It's fine, right? But, the pace at which the feedback loop goes into the product side of the engineering side is a lot less. So, we because we are so focused and anal about product quality, we wanted the the support team inside the product

26:20team itself. I mean, we we essentially, not exactly, have that at RevenueCat, but support has been an engineering attachments at RevenueCat since day one and it's like both for both for cultural reasons cuz like it's engineers asking most of our questions, so it makes sense. Um, talent reasons, but I just think that like it's same with like QA. Like I think QA, I don't know how if you guys are doing it or anyway special, but when I got into the industry, it was very normal for QA to be in the other building kind of

26:46situation, you know? And like I think now QA teams don't really exist cuz it's all been merged. You have junior engineers, right? You have like people on the team, and maybe it's support sometimes. Like that's kind of our closest thing to a QA team. It's like the support engineers like involved in the product development. Um

27:03and it seems to work so much better. The fewer dependencies you have, the better. And And if you have a dependencies, it cannot be the next building over, right? You should be able to Well, we don't buildings anymore, so we solved that problem. Right. Right. Everybody's in another building in 2026. Mentally you're in another building,

27:19right? Yes. You mentioned earlier in the podcast, and it was something again that stood out to me about your kind of philosophy is the bottoms-up, not marketing down. Any other top lessons there, or anything else you wanted to share about that approach to product development and marketing? For us, for our domain, service quality is massive. Because there are always a lot of corner cases, you know, I could be I think about it, right? You have a phone, 3G network in Nepal, and you're on Wi-Fi in your hotel, and then you walked out in an elevator, for some time it disconnected, and then you are on a

27:553G line or a 4G line, and then something else happened. You're in a bus, you're traveling, you you switch from one tower to the other tower. VPN in particular, as opposed to most of the other tech world, where you know, it's just quick request and response. It's a very long-lived connection, right? So, technically there are a lot of challenges that come with that. And people are our customers are on the

28:16move. So, a lot of focus on that. I mean, getting all the edge cases right. Like it is the whole product. The last 10% is the whole product, probably. It's kind of I think you said something to that effect in the beginning, but I think that's what, you know, sometimes differentiates great products and and commodities, right? Is like do they do they just always work? Um versus like

28:35sometimes maybe work. So, it's not just engineering, right? It's the operational discipline. That That is important. Meaning like reacting to all the issues, like actually taking the time and investing in finding them. Anticipating, reacting. I mean, our our QA guy actually walked with his phone to his into inside an elevator, down. He had a debug build so he could see all the logs at at that time, and he did the whole thing a few times. So, that's how, you know, that's how you get

29:02better. This is just a I mean, a mobile thing. I think in a lot of app developers, especially where we're now we're seeing like so many app developers coming into the market. And like you kind of always assume good Wi-Fi, beefy connections, whatever. Which is a rarity, right? Or certainly it's not going to like make your app great, you know? Like you you could be okay, but like if it's like I was using a fairly new app. I won't I won't name names, but like you've heard of it, and um it's in the AI category. And like their offline stuff just like didn't work for me. Like

29:33it like I downloaded it, and then I got offline and opened it up on the plane, and like I just got a login screen. And I was like, I mean, I I can see that's like a second-order case, right? Um and maybe that's forgivable for a first year app or whatever. But in mobile, like you have to nail that. You have to nail the offline case, the online case, the middle in case, the changing countries case, right? But I was kind of wondering, you know, again it goes back

29:52to like VPN being a commodity. Like what brands could potentially just attach a brand to it, you know, cuz sometimes like commodities just like Coca-Cola, it's the brand, right? You're not it's the sugar water, whatever, but it's mostly the brand you're buying. So, it's like are there brands that could just buy them being the brand they are?

30:09Like DuckDuckGo's maybe a good example. They're not they're even very niche. It might be like Symantec or something like that, but I think that's like a 20-year-old brand now. I don't think that or like whatever that doesn't really have the cachet that it maybe used to. But are there like are there like big brands like that? Or like and they just are not investing at the level

30:28that you are on the product? No, they are they are bigger brands. And without naming names, you know, there are bigger brands and bigger companies, and they come more from the desktop side in the VPN space. And this But that's that's a different problem, right? Like a desktop, you know, on the bus, you know what I mean? You're not like So is that your Is it your Is this just them by them not being mobile

30:47first? You By being mobile first, you can you can just have an advantage because We have an advantage. Desktop people pay more. Oh, sure. Sure. Well, it's a trade-off, right? It's like scale scale low LTV, you know, but but but there's a niche there, right? You have to go and tackle and understand that market a lot more, right? The users are different, right? The mobile user case I just explained, right? They're a little less more forgiving because they do experience these issues when when walking Right. Right. I'm not using this to connect to my company's VPN, right? So

31:17it's it's different. Desktop users are less forgiving. Yes, the tech technical challenges are not that the person is moving and shifting to 3G. You can assume that the the connection is strong, but, you know, if let's say if they're gaming, the reaction time needs to be very fast. Otherwise, you cannot you cannot have any latency

31:36in in in gaming, right? I was going to say I think that would be the only time I've used Well, except for work. I like a desktop VPN was like when I was trying to do LAN games with people and it was just easier to to have a virtual LAN that you're on. So the the challenges are different, right? Bandwidth is very high, right? If you they're downloading big content or streaming in 4G and all, you need to make sure the bandwidth is top tier. The

31:58latency is as low as possible. Everything is the same. And those are all things you control cuz it's like you have the edge nodes, you have the relays, like that's all infrastructure you have to monitor and and and pay attention to. We control it, but it's still a good engineering problem, right? Because you are connected to some servers for a

32:15very long time, for hours in many cases. So if the load balancing happens in a very different way. I mean, this is maybe too much This is off of the sub club beat, but like is it Can you just host that You guys just run that in a like a standard cloud infrastructure or do you need like

32:28specialized infrastructure? No. No. No. We have So our I'm getting a bit geeky with you right now, but It's great. We can edit it out. This is just for us. All right. Our control plane is in the cloud in the standard well-known cloud infrastructures. Our data plane is not because we lose our shirts because the bandwidth cost Yeah, cuz it's not designed for just

32:50tunneling tons of traffic. for that. So, our to go to like a layer lower to rent that or Yeah, where we have control, we get bare metal machines, we control it, we we wipe it out, and Oh, okay. So, you actually Yeah, that that that's very interesting. Which is also another advantage versus like any other David was talking about like kind of cost inputs, right? Like when you have that scale, you can afford to make the investment to control your data plane get way better rates, and that allows you to have like a different retail economics than than somebody who might have to rent it all from AWS and

33:17pay ingress egress or whatever. Yeah, yeah. So, so those cost optimizations we do. Not We don't do cost optimizations that'll affect service quality. That's the last thing we will touch. We won't touch it ever. This is great Sub Club content. I know what you're talking about, Jacob. We got a little nerdy there about control planes and data packets, but but it it

33:36is super meaningful. People on this podcast make software still, I think. That's you know what I mean? This is part of the how the sausage is made. And it's super meaningful to the business to build those cost advantages. And then as subscription app businesses, this is part of what you have to be figuring out. And like, you know, I mean, even in this conversation, I'm thinking about my dinky weather app, and part of the reason I don't have a freemium tier is because our data is

33:58really expensive. David, invest in weather stations. You need a weather station in every place on the earth. Well, now what a what a lot of apps do for for weather is they do actually just use the National Weather Service data, which is generally pretty good, and it's free, and we can like, you know, there there are ways that we can control our costs so that we could offer a freemium experience to users. So, that it's it's inspiring me to me to to go this deep because I I think a lot of people should

34:23be thinking along these lines. Revenue Cats had a free experience, and and we designed it to be supportable from the beginning. Like all of our cost scaling is such that like if if somebody's not paying if a user end end users not paying it doesn't really cost us much to support and that takes design choices, right? Like there's ways we could have designed it that wouldn't

34:40have been that way. And that's allowed us to maintain this really nice freemium tier. No, but you open up the funnel right there, right? 10x and it has to be still it has to provide meaningful value, right? Yeah, but then the value is we can give the product away for free if you're small, right? And just say like hey, just use it. Don't worry about it. We'll get you later. Don't worry about it, you

34:56know. In the era of insane inference costs, this is a very important as well. It's like Yeah, yeah. I mean every app that's AI driven is kind of you know, really having to think about this stuff heavily. You know, can you run an open source model? But but I think to Nagesh you keep hammering on don't sacrifice service quality. I think that is one of the challenges currently is that the leading model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic and Google have set the bar so high from what kind of a response you could get that a lot of people got super excited about Apple's on device AI stuff

35:30and my pushback the whole time was like people just expect so much out of AI and you're not going to get that from a local model. And it's going to be a while and then as as soon as the local models get better, the leading models will get even better. And so but there are opportunities cut costs by using open source models, by using different hosting and things like that. But if you do that at the expense of service quality, if your product degrades because you're trying to cut costs,

35:55that's not a good experience. this is this is really prescient in the the AI moment for all these apps that are shipping AI features too. It's like you know, it's it's a it's also important to think about cuz I I assume you all did not have your data plane in house on day one, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So day one you don't build for Google scale or for our scale,

36:14right? Fastest. It's all about the fastest, right? You need to be the fastest. Get to market fastest. You can optimize the cost later. Exactly. And then that's what I was going to suggest is like have a path. Just understand that you can and it's like when we're we're building AI stuff internally at RevenueCat right now, it's like don't worry about it. We'll we'll spend the big It's going to be expensive. It's going to be a loss leader or whatever. Two things are going to happen. The models are going to get cheaper in 6 months, 12 months, and then we're also going to get smarter about using them. So, like, the the costs are

36:38not going to go up from here, right? So, the marginal costs at least. Time to market is huge. The you know, initially your your volume won't be that big. If the volume If the volume gets bigger, it's the good problem to have. this is always a I love this is like a classic like early entrepreneur mistake when they're like, you over obsess about I'm going to lose my shirt or like whatever. It's like, this is not going to be a problem. If it is a problem, it's a good problem, right? And like, I don't think any Also, I don't think AWS has taken anybody's house yet for not

37:05paying a bill, so like, typically Don't optimize too early. Find a product market fit, you know, grow the funnel, and there's so many levers that you can pull for for cost without sacrificing service quality. Yeah, I mean, I just love the philosophy of like, focus on the product. I mean, this is RevenueCat MO is customer obsession. Just talk to a customer, see what they want. That's our only guiding principle is like, talk to them and see what's broken, and then apply our gifts to try to to serve them, and you know, ultimately creating surplus value, right? Which then you mentioned the money will come, and it will. Like, if

37:34you create surplus value, the actually capture part can is kind of the the easy part, right? If there's so much surplus value created, you'll find a way to like to share in that. And there's optimizations. You can 1 2 X 5 X that one way or the other, but like, unless you focus on the first thing, which is value creation, none of the rest is

37:50going to matter. So, in those early days, well, actually, let's let's even step back. So, my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, Super Unlimited was spun out of Rakuten. How did that all happen? And then And then we can tie it into like the early days where you were just using, you know, off-the-shelf cloud hardware. And then when When did it start making sense

38:10to to build out your own infrastructure? Yeah, Super Unlimited was spun out, but not from Rakuten. So, I had left Rakuten. I joined this company at that time that was called AnchorFree, and we used We had a few VPN products. You can look it up. But during while I was there, we had bought this product called VP VPN Super Unlimited Proxy. Good enough product, nothing like what it is right now. And I was there as I was running engineering at that that company. I was their CTO. And then when Anchorfree was bought by a larger company, I decided to step away. My investors said, "Hey, Tanel, you don't

38:43go anywhere. Here's the product that we bought. Can you run it? Let's let's just try to grow it." It sounds fun. Let's try it out, right? I had managed engineering I'm an engineer I've done engineering and then managed engineering all my life. This was something interesting. I'm like, "What do I have to lose? Let's try it out." And yeah, so I was not the founder of the product. It came from somewhere, but we grew it substantially over the last 5 years. So, 5 years ago, beginning of January in 2021, we spun off Super Unlimited as its own

39:14company. That's a crazy story. From app acquisition to spun out to the top VPN app with a billion downloads. That's crazy. So So, what point in that in that story early on you were just on commodity hardware? When did things start picking up? What was the inflection point? What happened that that really started move the needle? And then when did you start building out

39:38your own infrastructure? It was not like one golden moment where everything changed, right? It was a lot of things along the way. Unfortunately, there was no one silver bullet. But you know, we looked in like I said, we looked into reviews. What's keeping us away from being the number one product? A lot of

39:54it came back to service quality for us. So, we spent a lot of time on service quality. And that's thankfully that's my that's my DNA and that's how I think, too. We started building a team. We started focusing on service quality. We started some basic things about ASO, you know, localizations and and whatnot. But mainly service quality. And then things started going up. In the last 5 years, as you know, a lot of geopolitical things also happened, right? Where suddenly we'll get a massive spike. So, as we were starting to go up, we will see a massive spike from country A versus country B. And what happens is

40:28once the spike is gone, you hit a new normal at at a higher level. So, you know, so some of those things also And we were like I said, in many cases we were not making money, we were we were losing money. There are many countries right now in the this world where we lose a lot of money, but it's totally okay with us. That was totally okay with us even then, right? We "Okay, let's let's build a product that everybody wants to use and and we are proud of." And that flywheel took effect. We kept in improving service quality. We spent some time on the SO,

40:54you know, those things we did, but I'm sure there are companies that are doing a much better job than us on that one. But the thing that I'm is not important, it's important and we we spent some time on it. Did we do the best we could? At that point, yes. Are there better ways to do it? I'm 100% sure, yes, right? So, most of it was product. Give give the service to anybody who needs it. Don't over index on monetization. Money will come. All those things that we talked about earlier, right? So, and slowly and surely it went up. Talking about ratings, right? So, we also broke down

41:24the ratings by different countries, for example, right? Okay, you know, this country, the ratings are quite a bit lower than US, let's say, right? Why is that? So, so understanding and digging into the details helped us a lot. One thing I've learned is from this is that VPNs are good like inverse a hedge against world order. So, like if Ray Dalio's right, everything's breaking down, I should just buy VPN stocks cuz like apparently that's a good

41:51Yeah, a good hedge. So, what we did was we expanded, we added lot lot of new vendors, we upgraded our vendors. I mean, also you I imagine you have to internationalize too at some point. Like you need nodes in like every country for like good latency and stuff like this. So, we have tens of thousands of servers

42:06in dozens of countries right now, yeah. Coming back, we We use cloud for spikes, right? The downside of bare metal is it cannot handle surges that well, right? We can add a little extra capacity, but think of the turkey kind of a situation where we added I mean, we were practically serving Turkish population.

42:23solution to the spike problem, right? You either are way over provisioned and you're losing your shirt or like you and you can't react like fast even even if it's a a wave that takes days, it's like takes time to provision. So then you use cloud providers for surges, right? Soak up this the excess, right? Soak up the excess very quickly. Bare metal you have to order it and they take a week for them to deliver and nobody

42:42has 500 servers sitting around, right? Yeah. Exactly. Well, somebody has to, right? So it's just like how it's a it's a financial operation problem to see who holds that. Which is like going back to the thing David about like, you know, building your own weather parsing or running your own local models. It's like when you add in all the costs of like the hardware sitting there and not being used, you know, like at least if you're buying tokens from Anthropic or whoever, like you know, they're fully utilizing their hardware, right? So there's a much higher utilization, right? So you you you might be surprised that like your

43:15amortized costs aren't that different. Yeah, now if you're building a company or a mobile app which is not a VPN, just go with cloud, right? I mean, and prove fastest way do it and then optimize later. Everything's portable, too. The nice thing about, you know, TCP/IP is standard. You can you can do it on anything. What What are the other things I did

43:34want to dig into was the 80/20 rule. Like I know that's part of your philosophy, but you've also talked again and again about service quality. Like how do you not over perfect everything and still actually ship? How do you balance and decide what's good enough when your North Star is service quality? We cannot compromise on privacy or trust and we don't compromise on service quality. What we can compromise on is

43:59features. So I'll give you an example. The algorithm itself for a VPN user which server to connect to, which protocol to use, is very complex, right? And the algorithm that you need or the the rules that you need to connect you in the US will be very different from somebody who's connecting from, let's say, Saudi Arabia, right? We have built a lot of domain expertise to understand what we need to do for which country, right? We were building this algorithm and it would have taken months and months to build it right. So, we said, "Okay, you know what? Do we have this algorithm, what we think is right for

44:31these five countries? Let's just launch it." So, we use feature flags and we used it just for those five countries and for the rest we can build over time. We could be wrong. We could have been wrong, right? In which case we have to iterate on it and and got it right. We we could have introduced some bugs. So,

44:46iterate it right now and get it right. So, that's how we do it, right? We we will do it in smaller chunks rather than build a big massive Taj Mahal and launch it. All right. Well, as we're wrapping up, there's three questions I now ask every guest. So, let's start with what is the biggest win of the last year? An experiment that, like, you know, increased revenue 20% anything like that, a new paywall. What

45:09was the biggest win of the last year? It's less about an experiment, it's more about us building and launching our Windows product. As I mentioned, it's a first world problem, but the downside of being number one is where's the new growth coming from? Where's the forward looking growth coming from? And this is what we are betting on. This is one one of the big things that we are betting on that will drive us future growth. We are

45:28already starting to see a lot of takers. People are coming in onto our website and buying it directly with the surprise. Like, our website was didn't even exist. So, our brand is known. We have to start doing a lot more product marketing this year. So, building a product that we we are happy about, that we are proud of, is great. It took more time because we had a product we were not very happy with some of the service quality issues. I'm sure there's still issues that we will find, but but but finally it was at a place where where we are very happy about. We launched it and

46:00we are very excited about us showcasing it to our users for future for our forward-looking growth. I don't think many companies in 2026 would say that their biggest win was launching on Windows. But that's a pretty cool Don't sleep on Windows, David. Don't sleep on Redmond. It's It's It's a lot of companies' famous last mistake, you

46:20know. All right. And then how about what was the biggest fail of the year? Experiment that went off the rails. Not shipping on Windows soon enough. Sorry. I think not a big one, but a lot of little ones, right? Like we talked about the the the screenshot exper- our we're working towards on improving our design and UI. It's a bit stale still. It has improved a lot over

46:41the last in the last 12 months. Sometimes, as we talked about, right? We we tried new ways of screens. 80% of them failed because people didn't like it. The previous screens were much better. We just thought, you know, these designs are, you know, not that great, but it's what people like. So, that's that's what I would say. If it's the biggest, I don't know, but it's one of

47:00the things that surprised us. And lessons learned. Oh, that's great. That counts. Biggest fail was changing your screenshots to a prettier design. Again, not a failure you'd expect. Never change anything. That's kind of I And then the last question is growth would be easier if if we figured out how to bundle our offerings without friction, right? We won't get it So, we have Windows now. We have We We just launched as Eastern product. We We are acquiring and almost at the at the end of acquiring a second phone number. Great products. How do we

47:34bundle? What kind of message do we do? How do I reduce friction in terms of, you know, people using the other products, too? Who do I target? How do I target? So, I think there's a lot of things and a lot of experiments we will run. We won't get it right the first time 100%, but I think there's definitely a big cohort of users who want to use these other products. We have to We have to get the answers right there. So, yeah, it'll be easier after

47:56we fail a few times. All right. Well, as we wrap up, anything you wanted to share with our audience, any job postings you want to shout out, or anything our audience can do for you? There are a lot of job postings. All of them are in Asia or Europe. Uh so We we have a big audience around the

48:11world, so yeah. Because our product and engineering teams are mainly in Asia and Europe, so that's why we we want it there. We are looking for an eSIM product manager. We are looking for a growth product manager, growth manager, or a director. eSIM product manager, ideally somebody who's worked worked in the eSIM space. We are always looking for engineers and QA people. There are at least 15 job postings. I don't remember all of them right now, but if you have any if you are excited about this, if you are in Asia or Europe, please send an email to jobs@superlimited.com, and I promise you I will personally take

48:42a look. Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us, Tanuj. This was a a really fun conversation, a lot of great insights. Nice to talk to you. Thanks, Jacob. Take care, David. Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com

49:03to join our private community.