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.

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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 p