Europa

About

A marketplace, not a service.

Most VPN companies are one business with a global server fleet, one monthly subscription, and one privacy policy. Europa is a directory of independent operators — each runs their own servers, sets their own prices, and sells VPN access directly to you. We don't take a cut, we don't hold your money, and we don't vouch for any of them.

How it works for you

  1. Browse the directory. Operators list themselves with a price, region, and supported protocol (WireGuard or OpenVPN). Filter on what matters, sort by newest, cheapest, or most recommended.
  2. Pay the operator directly. Payment is Bitcoin Lightning or ecash, going straight from your wallet to theirs. The marketplace is out of the loop — no escrow, no card on file, no monthly statement.
  3. Get a config file. The operator hands back a standard WireGuard or OpenVPN configuration. You import it into the official client (the same one you'd use for any other VPN), connect, and you're on.
  4. When the bundle runs out, it's done. No auto-renewal, no surprise charge. Buy another bundle if you want to keep going, or pick a different operator.

Why independent operators

Big VPN providers are convenient, but they consolidate trust into one company in one jurisdiction with one privacy policy. If that company gets bought, served, or breached, every customer is affected at once.

An independent operator runs a small business: one or a few servers, in a jurisdiction they chose, under a policy they wrote. The marketplace gives them a way to reach customers without paying for ads or building a billing platform. It gives you the option to spread your traffic across operators you actually picked — instead of trusting a single brand to choose everything for you.

Reputation comes from people you trust, not from us

We don't rate operators. Anyone who pays an editorial site to rate them is buying a placement; we don't want to be either side of that transaction.

Instead, recommendations and complaints come from people you already follow on Nostr (an open social network some of our users are on). Sign in and the directory weights endorsements from your network; type in someone's handle and you can borrow their network for the session, read-only. If nothing about Nostr appeals to you, ignore the feature — the directory still works, and you can always start with the smallest bundle from an unfamiliar operator to bound your risk.

What this site does not do

No vetting. We don't verify operators' identities, jurisdictions, or no-logs claims. Those are the operator's claim, not a fact we can check.

No escrow. If an operator takes your payment and disappears, we can't refund you — we don't hold the money. To bound that risk, start with the smallest bundle (often an hour, a few cents) and scale up only after they actually deliver.

No custom VPN client. We don't ship our own app or tunnel software. You use WireGuard or OpenVPN — open-source clients that have been audited by people who don't work for us.

For the curious: the protocol underneath

The marketplace is built on an open Nostr-based protocol (CC0 — anyone can implement it). Operator listings are public events on the Nostr network; recommendations are public events on the Nostr network; the directory you're looking at is one viewer of that data, not the data's source. Other directories can — and probably should — exist. If we make bad editorial choices, you can leave.

If you want the full picture — what an operator publishes, how payment is wired, what reputation looks like structurally — read the specification on GitHub.

Where to go next