About

Two people from the Midwest who've done this before.

Ben and Shawn founded SecureTunnel in 2002. Ran it for 13 years. Shut it down clean in 2015. We're the same two people. The domain never changed hands. You can verify that.

Domain provenance
SecureTunnel.com
2002 Registered
24 yrs Ownership
0 Transfers
Verifiable at lookup.icann.org →

The full story. Nothing omitted.

Ben and Shawn built SecureTunnel from scratch in 2002 because they believed in internet privacy — not because it was a trend, and not to flip it. At the time, most people didn't even know what a VPN was. The word wasn't in the consumer vocabulary yet. We were early.

We ran it for 13 years under our own names, on our own infrastructure, with no investors and no holding company behind us. Every decision was ours. Every promise was ours to keep. We did keep them.

In 2015, we shut it down. We didn't get acquired. We weren't breached. We didn't run out of money. We burned out. Running a VPN the right way — without cutting corners on security, without selling user data, without outsourcing support to a bot farm — is hard. On two people, around the clock, it becomes unsustainable.

We told our subscribers first. Gave them time to find an alternative and migrate. That wasn't a legal requirement. It was just the right thing to do.

"We will shut this down before we sell it out. We've done it once. That option is always on the table."

We kept the domains. We watched the industry from the sidelines. And what we watched was not good. The VPNs people trust to protect them were quietly being acquired by holding companies with roots in adware and data collection — the exact kind of companies our customers were trying to hide from. "Zero logs" became a marketing slogan. Affiliate review sites became pay-to-play. The trust the industry needed to earn was being auctioned off instead.

We're back. Same two founders. Same domain. WireGuard instead of OpenVPN. AI handling the operational grind that wore us down last time. And zero intention of ever selling out.

2002
Two guys. One idea. Zero VC money.
SecureTunnel.com goes live before "VPN" was a consumer word. Domain registered and never transferred.
2002–2015
13 years of doing it right.
Self-funded. No investors. No holding company. Our names on everything, our integrity on the line every day.
2015
We shut it down. Not because it failed.
Burnout. We closed clean, notified subscribers first, kept the domains. Walked away with our integrity intact.
2015–2026
The industry got worse.
Major VPN brands quietly acquired by holding companies with roots in adware. "Zero logs" became a marketing line. Affiliate reviews went pay-to-play. We watched it happen.
2026
We came back.
WireGuard. AI-assisted operations. Three founders who know exactly what not to do. Same values. No intention of ever selling out.
The team
Co-Founder & CEO
Ben
Strategy · Brand · Affiliates · Finance

Based in Fargo, ND. Has been in the internet privacy space since before most people knew they needed to be. The person responsible for what SecureTunnel says and promises.

  • Strategy & positioning
  • Affiliate & partner relationships
  • Financial oversight
  • Brand & domain decisions
  • Content & communications
Co-Founder & CTO
Shawn
Infrastructure · WireGuard · Security · AI Tooling

The engineer behind everything that runs. Built and operated the original SecureTunnel infrastructure for 13 years. The person responsible for what SecureTunnel actually does.

  • Infrastructure & server automation
  • WireGuard protocol stack
  • Security architecture & abuse prevention
  • AI tooling integration
  • Client app development
COO & Quality Lead
Todd
QA · Operations · Customer Experience

Ops anchor with real-world systems management experience — field technology, GPS fleet tracking, team coordination at scale. The person who signs off before anything ships to customers.

  • Kill switch & DNS leak testing
  • Multi-platform regression testing
  • Release sign-off gate
  • Customer support operations
  • Relationship management
Why we came back when we did

The industry filled the void with companies that had no such reservations.

Between 2015 and 2026, many of the VPN brands people trust most were quietly acquired by a small number of holding companies — several of which have documented roots in adware and data collection. The very products people buy to protect their privacy are now owned by the industry they're trying to hide from.

Consumer Reports found that the majority of VPNs tested either inaccurately represented their products or made claims they couldn't verify. Half had no current third-party security audit. Affiliate-driven review sites are essentially useless — nearly every "best VPN" list is pay-to-play.

The trust the industry needed to earn was being auctioned off instead. That's why we came back.

Three things make this relaunch different from the first one.

WireGuard. When we shut down in 2015, OpenVPN was the standard. WireGuard has changed the game — faster, simpler, smaller attack surface, and significantly easier to operate at our scale. It's a better protocol in every direction that matters.

AI-assisted operations. The daily grind that burned us out — support tickets, server alerts, content updates, monitoring — is now automatable in ways that simply didn't exist at scale in 2015. We can run this leaner without running it worse.

We know what not to do. Thirteen years of hard-won knowledge about abuse patterns, infrastructure failure modes, and customer trust means we build the right guardrails from day one rather than learning the expensive lessons later.

Our commitments to subscribers
01

Real names. Real jurisdiction.

Ben, Shawn, and Todd. Fargo, ND. Sterling Security Research, Inc. No shell companies. No mystery ownership. Verifiable at ICANN.

02

Logging policy in plain English.

We tell you exactly what we log, why, and how long. Written for humans, not lawyers. If you need a lawyer to understand it, we wrote it wrong.

03

Prices that don't change on you.

Signup rate equals renewal rate. We remind you before every billing cycle. No introductory prices that triple on month 13.

04

Published infrastructure regions.

Every server location, every country. No phantom servers. No inflated counts. You know exactly where your traffic goes.

05

Independent audit, committed.

We will pursue a third-party no-logs audit within our first year and publish the results — whatever they say. An audit only published when it's flattering isn't an audit.

06

Subscribers hear first.

If this business ever stops being worth running clean, subscribers are notified first and given time to move. We've done this before. We know how.

We will shut this down before we sell it out.

In 2015, we had options. We could have cut corners, loosened the logging policy, taken on investors, or sold to one of the holding companies quietly buying up VPN brands. The money was there. We shut the servers down instead.

That option remains permanently on the table. If this business ever reaches a point where the only path forward requires compromising what we've promised our subscribers — we close it. Not sell it. Not hand it off quietly. We close it, tell subscribers first, and give them time to move.

This is not a values statement. It is a track record. We already did it once. The 2015 shutdown is verifiable history, not a marketing line.

2015
We proved it once