FAQ

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Pricing

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Why $5.80/GB on Developer when Webshare is$1.40/GB?

Webshare optimizes for budget shared-residential — many users sharing the same IP pool. AvocadoVPN’s residential pool is fed by directly compensated home node operators (USDC weekly), which is more expensive supply but produces cleaner IPs that haven’t been hammered by 100+ concurrent scrapers. If your use case is high-volume + tolerant of dirty IPs, Webshare is fine. If it’s lower-volume, sensitive to IP cleanliness (anti-bot-protected sites, banking/KYC, geographic ad verification), the price-per-success-rate calculation usually favors us.

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What happens if I hit my GB cap?

Two paths, configured per key:

• Default (overage opt-out): Gateway returns HTTP 402 (Payment Required) on every request once you exhaust your tier’s GB. No surprise charges. You wait for the next billing cycle (1st UTC) or upgrade.
• Overage opt-in: Gateway keeps serving traffic. Overage rate per tier:
  • Developer: $5/GB
  • Team: $4/GB
  • Scale: $3/GB

Toggle overage in the dashboard per-key. Off by default.

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Is the free tier really forever?

Yes. 500 MB/month, 3 rps, 5 countries. No credit card. Doesn’t expire after 14 days, doesn’t auto-upgrade after 30 days, doesn’t ask for billing info if you stay under the cap. We pay for it via the paid tiers. What we DON’T do on free tier:

• Priority routing (paid tiers get first dibs on the cleanest exits).
• Sticky sessions longer than 10 minutes.
• Email support faster than “best effort, EU business hours.”

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Why per-month billing instead of per-GB?

Per-month + included-GB is cheaper per-GB at predictable usage levels. If you’re going to use exactly 5 GB, our $29 Developer tier is$5.80/GB. If we were pure pay-per-GB at $5.80/GB we’d need to bake in the option-value of unpredictability, which would push the rate higher. We will offer pure pay-per-GB pricing for Scale-tier customers post-beta if there’s demand.

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Privacy + logging

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Do you log my proxy traffic?

The gateway logs:

• Connection metadata: timestamp, client API key, target host:port, bytes sent/received, exit node ID.
• NOT logged: the actual bytes flowing through the tunnel. We don’t have content-level visibility because the tunnel is end-to-end encrypted (TLS) between you and the target.

The node-provider client:

• Reports byte counts to the gateway for metering.
• Does not see plaintext content (TLS-tunnel agnostic).
• Does not log target host destinations (the gateway holds that mapping, not the node).

Retention: connection-metadata logs are retained for 30 days for billing reconciliation, then aggregated into per-key monthly summaries and the raw rows deleted.

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Can I subpoena AvocadoVPN to identify my customer’s traffic?

Possibly — see the threat model in concepts/residential-vs-datacenter. We can be legally compelled to hand over what we have, which is connection metadata (timestamp, key, target host, bytes) for the last 30 days. We CAN’T hand over content because we don’t store it. For maximum-privacy use cases, layer Tor / a no-log VPN on top of AvocadoVPN. We’re optimized for residential-IP cleanliness, not anonymity.

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Do node operators see my traffic?

No. The TLS tunnel between your client and the target is opaque to the node — the node sees only encrypted bytes flowing through. Even when the target is plain HTTP (port 80, no TLS), the node-provider client is configured to NOT inspect or log packet contents. We technically COULD make the node provider see content (we control the client). We don’t, because:

• It would expose node operators to legal liability for the content flowing through.
• It would break our privacy positioning and the trust model.
• It’s not what node operators signed up for.

The node-provider open-source client at github.com/avocadovpn/node has the no-content-inspection guarantee in code. You can audit it yourself.

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Is there a transparency report?

Not yet. We’ll publish one quarterly post-launch covering:

• Number of subpoenas/legal requests received.
• Number complied with.
• Aggregate categories of data handed over (always connection metadata, never content).

First report planned for Q3 2026 (60-90 days post-launch).

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Legal + regulatory

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Is residential proxying legal in France?

Yes, as a B2B infrastructure service. AvocadoVPN is a data-processing infrastructure provider; node operators are auto-entrepreneurs (or equivalent) providing residential bandwidth as a service. What we CAN’T do:

• Knowingly route traffic for illegal activity (CSAM, drug markets, fraud). Our ToS prohibits this and our protocol logs block decisions.
• Operate without a clear data-processing controller designation under GDPR — we are the controller for connection metadata, the customer is the controller for content.

Our French legal counsel (TBD — see Hermes v1.2 §2A for shortlist) is reviewing the model before public launch.

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Is paying node operators in USDC a regulated activity in France?

Probably not under MiCA’s 10 DASP services list. Distributing your own treasury to service providers is neither custody (we don’t hold third-party crypto), exchange (we don’t run a marketplace), nor transfer-on-behalf-of-third-parties (the USDC is ours, not theirs). But “transfer on behalf of third parties” has ambiguous edges and we’re getting a written opinion from a crypto-specialist French lawyer before publishing the node operator agreement. If the analysis comes back as “yes, this triggers DASP”, we have until July 1, 2026 (MiCA transitional deadline) to register. We’re tracking this.

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Do I need to declare USDC earnings on my taxes (as a node operator)?

Yes. Per French tax authority guidance, USDC compensation for residential-proxy services is BIC service income (Bénéfices Industriels et Commerciaux) — taxed at the moment of receipt, valued in EUR at the on-chain timestamp. This is NOT the same as the 30% / 31.4% French crypto flat tax (which applies to crypto-asset DISPOSAL, i.e., selling). Receiving USDC as service compensation is normal income, not a crypto disposal event. We provide a transaction log export at year-end so node operators can plug it into their tax declaration. Same applies to Auto-entrepreneurs in France — declare USDC payouts as professional services revenue (€10/week × 52 weeks = €520/year, easily within the €77,700 micro-BIC cap). For other countries: ask your local accountant. We can’t give global tax advice.

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Node operations

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How much do I really earn?

Math (standard residential tier — confirm live rates at /api/v1/pricing/node-payouts):

• $0.10/GB residential — the rate every standard node earns. Founding-10K members lock in 2× ($0.20/GB equivalent).
• A typical home node on gigabit fiber can route 100–300 GB/month before the household notices.
• Standard node @ 100 GB/mo = $10/mo. Founding-10K node @ 100 GB/mo =$20/mo (rate is permanent for verified founding members).
• Heavy node @ 500 GB/mo = $50/mo standard,$100/mo founding.

This isn’t a get-rich product. It’s “your already-paid-for broadband becomes a small monthly USDC stream.” Best case: covers your home internet bill plus a meal out.

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What’s the founding-10K 2× reward?

The first 10,000 verified node operators lock in 2× the residential payout rate, permanently — not just the first 6 months. As long as the node stays verified and meets the uptime floor (95% rolling 30-day), the founding multiplier stays applied to every GB routed. Founding status appears as a badge in the node-provider dashboard (“Founding · 2×”). The badge is set by us after verification (identity + reasonable-uptime check). Spots are first-come; verified founding-member status is non-transferable.

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What happens if I turn off my node?

You lose pending earnings since the last weekly payout. Already-paid USDC is yours forever (it’s on-chain). There’s no penalty for going offline — it’s voluntary participation. We just stop routing traffic through you.

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Can I run a node from a VPS / data center IP?

No. The whole point is residential IPs. We detect VPS/datacenter ranges (AS-level lookups against IPinfo and similar) and reject those nodes from the residential pool. If you want to monetize a VPS, the future “Datacenter Pool” tier (Q3 2026) will accept those — but at a lower per-GB rate because datacenter IPs are commodity supply.

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Is there a minimum bandwidth or uptime?

• Minimum to earn anything: at least one tunnel routed in the calendar week (the payout window).
• Practical minimum to be useful: ~50 GB/month routed and >70% uptime. Below that, the routing layer skips your node in favour of higher-availability ones.
• Founding tier minimum: 95%+ uptime over the verification week. Once you have the badge, occasional offline periods don’t lose it.

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Technical

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What protocol does the gateway speak?

HTTP CONNECT (RFC 7231 §4.3.6). Standard HTTPS proxy protocol — every HTTP client library on every language supports it natively. No custom SDK required. You authenticate via HTTP Basic in the Proxy-Authorization header (or in the URL: http://keyId:secret@api.atlasvpn.live:7777).

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Why not SOCKS5?

CONNECT is enough for HTTPS use cases. SOCKS5 adds DNS-over-proxy and arbitrary-protocol support but most use cases (web scraping, HTTPS API calls) don’t need either. We may add SOCKS5 in Q3 2026 if there’s demand. Email support@atlasvpn.live if it’s a blocker.

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What happens if a node disconnects mid-tunnel?

The gateway returns HTTP 502 to the client and the connection terminates. The client should retry; the gateway will re-pick a different node. There’s no transparent failover within an active tunnel because the node holds the residential IP — you can’t seamlessly switch IPs mid-request.

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What’s the typical CONNECT establishment latency?

From our load test (2026-04-25):

• p50: 39ms
• p95: 51-77ms
• p99: 115-775ms (the long tail is geographic — pinning a country far from the gateway adds latency)

Steady-state per-request overhead is dominated by the geographic distance to the exit node, not by us.

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Can I bring my own residential IP and use it as a private exit?

Not in beta. Post-launch we’ll have a “Private Pool” Enterprise tier where you bring your own home/office IPs (running our node client) and the gateway routes ONLY your traffic through them — useful for compliance-bound workloads. Pricing TBD; talk to sales@atlasvpn.live.

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Roadmap

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When will SOCKS5 / IPv6 / HTTP/3 be supported?

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When will mobile country coverage expand beyond FR/DE/ES/NL/UK?

Adding US + CA in Q3 2026. Adding APAC (JP/SG/AU) in Q4 2026. The bottleneck is recruiting node operators in those regions. Contact partners@atlasvpn.live if you have a community in a country we don’t yet cover and want to bootstrap node operators there.

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Will there be an AVO token?

No, and we have no plans for one. The compensation layer is USDC for tax + regulatory simplicity (see legal Q above). Adding a speculative token would increase MiCA exposure with no proportionate user benefit. If we ever change our mind on this, it’ll be announced 90+ days in advance with a public ADR explaining the rationale.

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Anything else

Mail support@atlasvpn.live. We typically reply within 12 hours during EU business hours.