u/tocavpn

Full disclosure up front: I’m one of the people building this, so treat this as a dev asking for a reality check, not a recommendation.
About 6 months ago we started building TocaVPN. The reason was pretty specific: a VPN that still works in places where VPNs are actively being blocked, mainly Russia and China. Not “fast servers in 90 countries” marketing stuff — just the one thing that actually matters if you’re behind heavy DPI filtering, that it connects at all.
Building the app was the easy part. The hard part was getting reliably through the network restrictions, and honestly, testing it. If your main use case is heavily censored countries, you need people physically there to confirm anything works. Something connecting perfectly from Europe tells you basically nothing about whether it works from inside Russia or China. So it was a lot of trial and error — works, gets blocked, change something, test again, repeat. With the recent crackdown on certain protocols, that cycle has gotten a lot faster.
I’m not going to pretend it’s finished. We currently have a limited number of server locations, and the next things on the list are more locations, more protocols (so we have fallbacks when one gets restricted), and experimenting with built-in ad blocking.
The reason I’m posting here specifically: we’re at the stage where we’re trying to figure out if this actually has a real shot, or if it’s just another VPN in an oversaturated market. The one signal that’s kept us going is that we’re getting 200+ downloads a day with zero paid marketing — purely from people in the countries we built it for finding it themselves. That felt like something worth paying attention to.
So I’d like to ask this community directly, both as feedback and a gut check:
If your main requirement is “works in a heavily censored country,” what actually makes you trust and stick with a VPN? Would you even consider a smaller provider focused specifically on censorship circumvention over the big established names — or does the trust gap kill it before you’d try?
Happy to go into the technical/product side of what we learned if anyone’s interested. And I’m genuinely open to the “this won’t work because X” answers — that’s kind of what I’m here for.