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README.md

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+---
+
+# PaladinVPN
+A free VPN app I built in my spare time as a student with basically no prior experience.
+
+There are hundreds of free VPN apps on the Play Store. Most of them are fine honestly — some are genuinely good. But a lot of them are vague about how they work, who runs them, and what happens to your traffic. I wanted to build something where the answer to all of those questions is just... public.
+
+So here it is.
+
+---
+
+## How it works
+You watch a short ad. You get 60 minutes and 2GB of full-speed traffic. That's it. The ad pays for the server (actually not even enough). No accounts, no emails, no subscriptions.
+
+When your data runs out you get throttled to 1.5 Mbps instead of getting cut off. You can watch a bonus ad to top up anytime.
+
+---
+
+## The stack
+- **App** — Flutter (Android only for now)
+- **Server** — A single Debian box rented from Hetzner, located in Finland
+- **VPN protocol** — AmneziaWG, which is WireGuard with obfuscation so it works on carriers that block standard WireGuard
+- **Backend** — A Python script I wrote called Hivemind that manages sessions, data quotas, and throttling
+- **Ads** — Google AdMob rewarded ads, verified server-side so fake callbacks don't work
+
+---
+
+## Limitations (being honest)
+- One server, one location (Finland). That's all I can afford right now
+- 2 cores and 4GB RAM. It will not handle thousands of concurrent users
+- iOS is not supported and probably won't be for a while
+- Countries with very aggressive DPI (China, Russia, etc.) may still have issues
+- I'm a student doing this in my free time. Expect rough edges
+
+---
+
+## Why I built this
+Free time project. Wanted to learn how VPNs actually work under the hood. Ended up building the whole thing from scratch — the Flutter app, the AmneziaWG setup, the session management backend, the AdMob integration. It took way longer than expected.
+
+---
+
+## Privacy
+Your traffic goes through my server in Finland. I don't log it, I don't sell it, I have no reason to. The session manager (Hivemind) only tracks whether your session is active and how much data you've used — nothing else.
+
+Internet privacy at the cost of watching an ad. Honest business.
+
+You can read the server code yourself, it's in this repo.
+
+---
+
+*PaladinVPN is not affiliated with any VPN company.*
+
+---