At the end of the day, we do offer free resolvers that block specific categories of traffic. Anyone can use those without making a Control D account or a Windscribe account. The account and payment is required for the massive amount of additional customization we offer as part of Control D.
What follows below is a bunch of 10pm rambling I wrote for no particular reason but it does answer your question in greater detail.
Ultimately, Control D is a different service than Windscribe and there are a few reasons for this. There is certainly overlap in the abilities of both but Control D isn’t just some weekend project a few devs slapped together in their spare time to go alongside Windscribe. It’s a massive undertaking and at this point we have spent years developing the service and its features, and hired several employees dedicated exclusively to Control D work.
It’s simply not economically feasible to dedicate this much time and resources to a product we’d make little to no money from in the form of a bundle. Sure maybe we’d sell more “bundles” but then the cost of the bundle would have to drastically go up because we’d then have to pay for the development and operational costs of Control D and Windscribe. So instead of Windscribe being $69 per year and Control D being $40 per year separately, to support both as a bundle, we would have to charge something like $100 per year. The alternative would be for us to swallow those costs for Control D which is again financially unfeasible.
Control D is also targeted at a slightly different crowd of people than Windscribe. Our goal was to create the best competitor to other Smart DNS services, so when someone wants to use a DNS service, we are there to offer them the best solution on the market. They might not want a VPN at all, they might want just the DNS and its features. And someone else might want just the VPN. So it makes no sense to charge them both a higher price for 2 things, only one of which they will use, as opposed to just selling these services separately for a much cheaper price.
Additionally, Control D has to be its own entity from a Privacy Policy perspective. Windscribe can operate without any need for us to store your IP address because of how our VPN works. We have apps and infrastructure that is built around that premise, we don’t want your data. And the Windscribe Privacy Policy states that we don’t store your IP or any sort of traffic logs when you use the VPN.
Now for Control D we also don’t want your data, but a DNS service is impossible to operate unless we store your IP address. Yes of course we have our free resolvers that anyone can use and those don’t require any sort of IP from you to be stored, but I’m referring to all the custom rules and services that you can play around with as part of Control D’s feature set. If you set up Control D and we tell you to use this resolver 76.76.10.1, then in order to apply your custom rules to you specifically, we need to know the IP you are using Control D from. Otherwise, there is a crowd of thousands of people using the same DNS IP and we have no clue who has what custom rules.