RouteVeil
Private VPN Server Setup Service for China, Russia & Iran
Hey IH,
I've been setting up self-hosted infrastructure for a while, and I kept seeing the same problem: people living in China, Russia, and Iran rely on commercial VPNs that get blocked every few months like clockwork. The VPN providers patch things, the firewalls adapt, repeat forever.
The root cause is simple: shared VPN infrastructure is detectable. Millions of users routing through the same IP ranges creates a fingerprint that deep packet inspection systems are trained to find.
So I started RouteVeil — a service where I set up a private Xray Reality server on a VPS that the customer owns directly. Reality performs a genuine TLS handshake with a real domain, so the traffic looks identical to normal HTTPS. The firewall can't tell the difference.
The model is simple:
- One-time $99 setup fee
- Customer pays ~$5/month directly to their VPS provider (I never touch it)
- Up to 10 simultaneous users per server
- One week of support included
No subscriptions, no shared infrastructure, no logs — because it's literally their own server.
I'm two weeks in, zero revenue yet. The site is live at routeveil.com with pages in English, Chinese, Russian, Turkish, German, and Farsi.
Main challenge right now: reaching people who actually need this. The target audience is either behind a firewall (can't easily find me) or expats who haven't thought about this problem yet.
Happy to answer questions about the technical setup or the go-to-market approach.
5 Comments
The technical side actually sounds less risky than the distribution side.
One thing I'd be careful with is treating "people behind censorship systems" as the first market.
That is a huge group, but the buying urgency is very different between an expat who occasionally needs access, a remote worker whose income depends on access, a founder running global tools, and someone constantly fighting VPN blocks.
The expensive mistake is getting broad interest from people who agree the problem exists without learning which group will actually pay $99 quickly.
My guess is the first buyer is probably not "someone who wants a VPN." It's someone whose work breaks when access breaks.
Happy to put the tighter first-customer angle in writing if useful. I wouldn't try to solve that segment decision inside a comment.
This reframe actually hits. I've been thinking about it as "people behind firewalls" but the urgency gap you're describing is real.
The "work breaks when access breaks" angle makes sense as a tighter first segment. Remote workers and freelancers operating out of China or Russia whose income depends on reaching foreign tools — Stripe, GitHub, Google Workspace — that's a real problem with a clear cost.
I'd be interested in the tighter first-customer angle if you're up for it.
Appreciate that.
That “remote worker whose income breaks when access breaks” angle is exactly the kind of segment I’d want to pressure-test properly instead of guessing in the thread.
Send me your email and I’ll write the tighter first-customer angle properly. The useful part is deciding who has the clearest urgency, what pain language they’d actually respond to, and what first test would prove payment intent.
Appreciate it — reach me at "contact at routeveil dot com". Curious what the tighter angle looks like.
Sent you a note by email. Main thing is separating people who want access from the buyer whose work and income actually break when access breaks.