Duck Tales: The DuckDuckGo Subscription — more protection & peace of mind (Episode 10)
In this episode, Gabriel (Founder) and Chris (Subscription team) discuss why we built the DuckDuckGo Subscription, its four features, and how it protects more of what you do online. Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.Show notes: Learn more about the DuckDuckGo Subscription here. Gabriel: Hello everybody. Welcome back to DuckTales, everything DuckTale go. I’m Gabriel, founder, CEO. I got with me Chris. Do want to introduce yourself?Chris: Yeah, hi, I’m Chris Calvi, ⁓ long time listener, first time caller. Had to say that. ⁓ But ⁓ I’ve been at DuckDuckGo for a little over four years. I’m on the partnerships team here. And ⁓ I guess I’ll take a second to talk about the partnerships team, what we are. ⁓ We are primarily the team that handles all of the relationships with third party companies that DuckDuckGo works with.Chris: We’re a relatively small team, about 10 people. you know, classic examples of companies that we’d be working with are any of the live information that you’re seeing when you search DuckDuckGo. So that would be like sports scores or stock quotes, weather, that sort of information, also like flights and lyrics, all of those relationships, we get that information, we license it from...from other companies. that would be an example of work we would be doing. And then also, we will even work on things like infrastructure partnerships with cloud partners and AI companies and all that stuff. So that’s what we do over here at Partnerships more recently.Gabriel: Interestingly though, the way we work, and this gets more inside deck to go since the name of our blog on this, we don’t really work functionally though. We have objectives inside the company to get a particular thing done, and that thing usually involves many different functional teams. What that also means is those objectives have owners and they can be from any functional team. ⁓You tell me how you think of that, but I think if you do what doing recently actually was not very partnershipy. You’ve been helping launch different parts of our Dr. Go subscription, which involves some partnerships, but like your day-to-day job is not always partnership related.Chris: Yeah, mean, absolutely. And I think you as people, if they listen to a bunch of these episodes, they’ll see that. People might be leading an objective and they’re on the design team or in this case, the partnership team. A lot of times it is somebody from the product team. And in this case, I’m working a little closer on the product side. So you’re right.Gabriel: And yeah, so we’re going to talk today a little bit more deeply because you’ve been working on it about the DuckDuckGo subscription. We’ve mentioned it on some of these episodes, but haven’t really given a big overview. So that’s what this is going to be. The subscription is a bundle. So it’s got a bunch of different things in it, which maybe you can get an overview in a second. But just to say that we might have separate episodes about going deep into some⁓ One of those things are a technical aspect to them, but this is we can give more of an overview of kind of where it came from and what it exists today and kind of where we’re headed with it. You want to start and just tell us kind of like what’s in it and how it works.Chris: Yeah. Yeah, that sounds good. The DuckDuckGo subscription is a relatively new thing for us. We launched this in April of 2024, so it’s really only been around for a year and a half compared to the search product, for instance, that’s been around for a very long time. And what it does is really, I mean, in a nutshell, it supercharges some of the existing functionality you have. It gives you extra privacy features within your DuckDuckGo ⁓ app and experience. ⁓ It does a little beyond that too, which we’ll talk about, but that’s the key thing. ⁓ The other thing I will note is that if for long time subscribers, you may have originally remembered it being called Privacy Pro. That was the original name for it. We recently just changed it to DuckDuckGo subscription for to keep things simple. So we’ll call it the subscription for the rest of the episode. ⁓ But before I like...Gabriel: Yeah, give us the basics. yeah, what’s in it? Yeah.Chris: Yeah, the basic things, the four basic things in there are the, you got the VPN, which we’ll talk about what that is in a second. You get access to advanced AI models within Duck AI. You ⁓ get personal information removal, which I’ll talk about what that is, as well as identity theft restoration. But before I go down all that, I did want to ask back to you about ⁓ why we came up with a subscription. and then I’ll kind of unpack each of those core pieces.Gabriel: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, the way I think about it more broadly is we want to be your clean internet experience. Like if you want a more protected way to operate online where you’re not getting followed by ads and you’re not giving up your personal information, you kind of adopt the DuckDuckGo ecosystem. And so that’s our browser, it’s our search engine, it’s our AI product. And generally we want to offer those essentially for free. mean, there’s advertising model in the search engine that pays for this, but we can, we want to give it for free in the sense that mo because more people can use it around the world. However, there are certain protections that costs us a lot of money to do that we hadn’t been able to offer because of that. So VPN is the obvious, a canonical example there, because when you turn on the VPN, now all your bandwidth is running through that VPN and a lot of that’s video. ⁓ And it’s just not something that can be advertising supported. doesn’t, the numbers don’t add up. And so we’ve wanted to offer that because it is a key part of being fully protected for people who want that kind of fuller protection, but we couldn’t offer it for free. And so we needed a subscription. At that point, I thought, hey, we could just offer a VPN, but...I think there are other things in this category that have real marginal cost in business terms. ⁓ And it would be great if we could bundle them all together at one low price and allow DuckDuckGo users who really want more protection ⁓ to be able to get it in one place. You don’t have to sign up for multiple things. And that’s where the subscription came from. ⁓ I think we’re living up to that. hope over time we add more and more things and make it more and more valuable without increasing the price or much at all. ⁓ But yeah, that’s where it came from.Chris: Yeah, I mean, that makes sense to me. to dive into the four pieces of functionality, I’ll start with VPN, because you mentioned that. We probably should give a little bit of a high level of what a VPN is. So it stands for virtual private network. But what that means is that we basically have this anonymous private secure no logs VPN server that’s sitting out there, right? And we have these in 40 locations around the world. You likely are connecting to the one closest to you, but you can change it to go to another country. But what it does is all of your internet traffic, the requests that you’re making to, for instance, as you browse the web, are gonna be securely essentially tunneled through that server and then sent out to the resource where you’re requesting that information. So the website that you’re accessing,they’re not going to see, under normal conditions, without a VPN, they would see your IP address. In this case, they’re going to see the DuckDuckGo server’s IP address, which is meaningless, essentially, to them from a privacy perspective. So it preserves your privacy on that front. then they’re sending that information back, and then it’s coming back to you. So then the second place where it’s adding privacy is on your own, sort of like your internet connection. So if you’re...⁓ you’re making that request in a lot of cases your internet provider or if you’re using like a public Wi-Fi, they can see the sites that you are accessing and sometimes can see the information that’s coming back and forth. And in this case where it’s that since it’s all being encrypted and coming through the duck, going to DuckDuckGo server first, they’re only seeing that you’re connecting to this one server and that they’re not seeing any of the data in between. So it gives you sort of that two different protections when you use a VPN. I don’t know if I’ve done it justice.Chris: Yeah, I think you did a great job there. The only thing I would add to that is, yeah, so it really shields your IP address and other information from leaking to both your internet provider and the sites that you’re visiting, as well as all the places in between too. People may not realize like when you route across the internet, you connect to something and then you connect to like a bunch of different hops in between lots of other internet providers. And it shields not only from the end points, but everything in between.⁓ Additionally, the IP address is often used to get your location. ⁓ And so by effectively shielding your IP address, you’re effectively shielding your location. And the final thing I would add is like, it may seem esoteric, like do I need to shield this stuff from these people? ⁓ But it’s been well documented that ISPs, internet providers are selling this data all the time. ⁓ And so...If you want to be maxing protected, you do want to have the VPN. ⁓ And you know, I leave it on all the time, our VPN. The other thing, the final thing I would add, which you know, doesn’t relate to the privacy necessarily, but it kind of relates to it in the sense that trusting us is that we decided not to sub license this VPN or anything from anybody else. We are operate, we made this from scratch. We’re operating all the servers ourselves. ⁓ And so it’s fully DuckDuckGo operated.Chris: Yep. ⁓ Thank you. ⁓ And then on the kind of jumped into the next feature that I had mentioned was the advanced ⁓ AI model. So you get in Duck AI. So ⁓ Duck AI is free. You don’t need an account to access it. And it’s our AI chat ⁓ product. But if you’re a DuckDuckGo subscriber, you get ⁓ access to advanced models and higher limits on the models that are available for free.So the advanced models sort of the difference between the advanced models and the free models Well the advanced models just to name them are ⁓ open AI’s GPT 4o GPT 5 Anthropics ⁓ Claude sonnet 4 and Metas llama for Maverick and So we have these are available if you’re a subscriber and then we have the free models which are available to everyoneThose free models are great for lighter weight tasks that are optimized for speed, whereas these more advanced models are made for more complicated prompts and more challenging scenarios. I don’t know if you have anything to add on to that.Gabriel: No, that’s a good explanation. The only thing I would add would be it’s for the same reason like the VPN, like these advanced models cost a lot of money to run. when you’re the computation on advanced models, it’s more computation, more computation, it’s more cost. And so we just couldn’t offer them for free. But as part of the subscription, it’s a natural fit. if you’re paying for it, and we haven’t said the price yet, so why don’t you explain what our pricing is?Chris: Yeah. So.Gabriel: But if you’re paying for it, we can afford to give you this. But we’re still trying to strike a balance here and give. We’re not trying to make tons of money off this. We’re trying to give a good price for the bundle. And so we think we’ve been pricing it competitively.Chris: Yeah, absolutely. I should, yeah, let’s step back. the thing I’ll say is it’s available in 30 countries today. So the U S Canada, UK, and all 27 member countries of the European union. And you, the price in the U S is nine 99 a month and it’s nine or 99 99 a year. So basically $10 a month or a hundred dollars a year if you sign up annually.⁓ And then it’s that’s basically in your local currency if you’re subscribing from one of those other countries ⁓ But you can get a free seven-day trial too. So ⁓ That’s that’s important to note so you can give it a spin See if you like it and then if you do like it you can continue onGabriel: Got it, okay, so we have VPN and DuckAI advanced models. Now as I understand that those are available in all those countries, the other two features are more US, or there’s one of them US specific and one of them we need to talk about how it might differ, right?Chris: Yeah, yeah, let’s talk about personal information removal first because I think ⁓ that one is US only. And the reason for that is, you could probably go on about this, it’s primarily a US only problem. And so the way that, what happens if you’ve ever searched, for people listening, have you ever searched the internet for their name, which I’m sure everyone’s done at some point you’re going to see yourself show up in, especially if you type in your name in your city, if you have a less common name, you’re going to see a bunch of stuff show up, lot of of spammy sites that have your address, maybe your phone number, email, some other information, maybe socials. This stuff, ⁓ they are selling essentially, and in the US, a lot of countries make that illegal, in the US it’s not. So ⁓ what we will do is with personal information removal is,We help you go out and on your behalf, we opt you out from I think at least 80 sites like that today and we add more all the time. And so that’s how that works. Yeah, but I don’t know what else you have to add onto that.Gabriel: No, you’re right. I mean, that’s why it’s in the US because it’s just not a problem. It’s not really a problem outside of the US. I mean, the only thing I would add would be this is one of the reasons why people are getting tons of spam, texts and junk mail previously, now lots of, you know, everyone’s got a phone, spam, texts. And so if you remove yourself from these sites, that will reduce as well as potential for identity theft. And spam emails too, sometimes the emails out there. ⁓ In any case, ⁓ it’s US only, but if you’re in the US, it is a real problem. And I suggest you do something about it, if not from us, from somewhere, because it really does make a difference if you remove the things. Now, the other thing I would say, and we’ll probably do another episode of this, is that these sites are often, like you said,they’re buying and selling information from other sites and other places. And so if you just remove yourself once, your information will come back on these sites eventually because they ⁓ just buy it again and get it from somewhere else or from public record or something like that. That’s another problem with the US is they get it off from public records. like you like buy a house or something and they end up buying that information. ⁓ But that’s why you want a service to do it because we are constantly, the service is monitoring it and scanning these sites repeatedly. And so if your information shows up again, three months later, it’ll get noticed and then we’ll submit another removal request to remove it. So it’s kind of like always working in the background to remove yourself in an automated fashion from all these sites that we cover.Chris: Is it worth talking about kind of how that information stays on your local machine in this?Gabriel: Yeah, I think so. I think so because it’s a differentiator and it took us a lot more time to build this because of that. But I do think it’s a privacy benefit and worth it relative to other sites that do similar. Yeah, you want to explain it? I can do it too if you want.Chris: Yeah, mean, well, when you said it’s happening in the background, what we mean is quite literally on your computer in the background. It’s not happening on your data, you know, because we need, in order to opt out, you need to provide your name, right? And some information so that the service can opt you out. So rather than that information living on our servers and then doing the opt outs, it lives on your computer and does the opt out.And to your point, you mentioned that’s a differentiator. And it’s like a core thing for us is that we don’t want your personal information. As much as possible, we just don’t want it. And so that’s, I think, was worth mentioning with this product.Gabriel: Yeah, I’m actually not familiar with any other product that does it that way, that where your information really doesn’t live on an account on the server. It’s on your, in this case, your browser. It’s built into the browser. I think there’s two reasons for that. One is to do that, you have to have a browser. So we have a browser. So we were kind of uniquely able to do this versus like a web service. And also it’s a really pain to build this, to actually get it to work in the background. I don’t think anyone would do this. unless they really wanted to get that privacy protection ⁓ maximum, which is what we generally do. ⁓ So yeah, it’s unique in that regard. ⁓ We should probably mention that that is desktop only for that reason, because it was very difficult to bring it to mobile. But we’ve been working on bringing it to mobile. And that’s kind of like next step for personal information removal is bringing it to our iOS and Android browser.Chris: Yeah, I mean, I’m glad you mentioned that because I know that that is a big piece of feedback we receive. A lot of our users use, they may only use us on mobile, they may only have a mobile device, and so they’re not able to currently use this functionality unless they get a desktop going and get it going on there. So it’s exciting news. ⁓If we pivot over to that last piece, the four, so there’s the VPN, advanced AI models, personal information removal, and then that last one is identity theft restoration. This is essentially in the instances where you are the victim of ⁓ identity theft. ⁓and you mentioned that it’s a little bit the function, that way that it works is slightly different whether you’re in the US or in another country. If you’re in the US, if you use identity theft restoration, they’ll be able to do ⁓ some of the, if you’re trying to restore your credit and everything like that, whatever was stolen, they’re gonna give you guidance on how you can, ⁓ you’ll connect with an advisor, essentially you’ll make a phone call.They’re going to help you, they’re going to handle your case, help you get your identity restored. In some cases in the US, they’ll actually be able to handle some of that work on your behalf. They may be able to contact financial institutions and things like that for you. ⁓ For identity theft restoration outside of the United States, they’re only going to be able to provide you the steps, essentially. The guide, like they’re going to say, this is what you have to do, then you’ll have to do it. So that’s one, that is a different it’s worth noting between the US version and the ⁓ version available to everyone else. ⁓Gabriel: Yes, and so like this, I mean the way I think about this is, you know, we’re really trying as a company with the product to cover all the bases for you, you know, online and protection in your life. And so we’re, you if you use our product, you’re really reducing your personal information out there, essentially to the maximum you can easily. But it can never go to zero, unfortunately. And if someone’s really trying to target you,Maybe they’re looking through your garbage, who knows? You ⁓ can be a victim of identity theft and there’s a lot of people who have been the victim of identity theft, unfortunately, it’s not a small problem, certainly in the US. I know more about the US, but ⁓ it’s a big problem in the US in part because we were talking about those laws earlier. ⁓ But if you are, it can really be a big pain. ⁓Gabriel: People can open bank accounts on your behalf and credit cards and spend money. They can mess up your credit report. And so what this is is essentially a peace of mind such that if that happens, we’ve partnered with this service that 100 % focuses on helping people restore their identity. So you will get a personal advisor to really walk you through this process so you’re not on your own. And they do it every day.you that’s their whole business is what they do is help people restore their identity. ⁓ And so by buying into subscription, you’re essentially buying the, ⁓ for this part of the subscription, the ability to have access to this advisor should you unfortunately find yourself in this situation, which we hope never happens. But if it did happen, you’d have this ability to help you.Chris: Great, yeah. That covers the kind of the four, I don’t know how we’re doing on time, but that covers our four pieces of function.Gabriel: We have no real time limit. This is longer than we’ve normally gone, but we have, this is a big topic, so we don’t have to go super much longer, but if there’s a few things or anything else you want to hit, we could do so.Christopher: I I guess, like, I’ll just kind of piggyback. You made that point earlier about the subscription is about providing the extra functionality that would normally, that costs money, essentially. The other stuff we’re able to do in an ad-supported way or in a free way, whereas this, you know, the things that we’re offering here, it doesn’t work. You need to pay for it, essentially. ⁓ what I will say is that it’s very complimentary.to everything that DuckDuckGo is doing on the free side. And we continue to grow and add new stuff on the free side ⁓ all the time. But what I’ll say is that if you are a current user of either our search or ⁓ DuckAI or our apps, this is, like I’ve found it to be ⁓ just incredibly complimentary. It sits very nicely on top of all of that. You turn it on.⁓ And to your point, you said you use the VPN all the time. I use it all day, every day. I’m using it right now on this call and I use it ⁓ on my phone all day. ⁓ And it’s really quite delightful to have that extra protection on top of everything else and to have the extra AI models, know, GPT-5. 5 Mini is in the free version, but 5, just 5 is not. And so you get that with the...with the subscription and so, yeah, think I’ll just end it there. Some of the stuff that I really like about the VPN is you can opt out, know, unlike for instance the Mac version, you can exclude certain sites because certain sites don’t play as well with a VPN, like ⁓ some streaming video for instance, like Netflix, you might run into issues where they’re not gonna stream it to you. So you can exclude a site or, ⁓in my Android app I can snooze, ⁓ which you can snooze the VPN for 30 minutes, which is really great for if you’re troubleshooting or if you can’t access your bank’s app or whatever through. So that happens from time to time.Gabriel: Yeah, these are good points. mean, yeah, we can wrap it up. I mean, I agree it fits nicely and is designed to fit nicely just on top of our regular stuff. And in particular, it’s built in, it’s mainly built into our browser, right? So if you get it, then you have some extra stuff going on inside your experience that you can get access to. I should also add that a lot of the things that you just mentioned, those are new features since we launched this description. So.We’re adding new free stuff all the time. We’re adding actually stuff to the subscription all the time. You know, we have, we’ve plugged a few times, but we have a quarterly update website, ducktico.com slash updates. I think it’s slash updates. Yeah, okay. And you can go through and look at like quarter by quarter, there’s a section for the subscription and you can see, you know, what we’ve been doing there, but like we’re constantly thinking about what to add to it. So it’s not going to be static. In fact,Chris: It is, yeah.Gabriel: the AI model aspect of it, you worked on, just got added recently, right? So we have more coming and ⁓ yeah, so thanks Chris, thanks for coming on. Thanks everybody for listening this long. ⁓ I think we’ll do deep dives. I think we should do deep dives on each of the four things in a future episode. I think those would make good episodes. Yeah, cause there’s so much to cover there. All right, let’s get out of here. Thanks everybody.Chris: Yeah, for sure. For sure. All right, thanks Gabriel. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com
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