• DuckDuckGo now is expanding its free services with a paid tier that provides access to a VPN and some tools for recovering personal information on the web.
  • DuckDuckGo’s Privacy Pro plan costs US$9.99/month or or US$99 per year and is currently only available to users in the United States.
  • The service bundles three additional features, a VPN, personal information removal, and identity theft restoration.

Privacy-focused consumer tech company DuckDuckGo launched a new Privacy Pro subscription on Thursday that bundles a VPN service, personal information removal, and identity theft restoration.

DuckDuckGO‘s new plan Privacy Pro

DuckDuckGo is a solid web browser for those who care a lot about privacy. It doesn’t offer some of the fancy features that other browsers may offer, but it doubles down on the protective features that make the web a great place to live.

Privacy Pro plan costs US$9.99 per month or US$99 per year and is currently only available to users in the United States. This is the first time the company has built a subscription service into the DuckDuckGo browser.

DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014 but has so far relied on advertising revenue. Subscription services have opened up a new way for the company to make money.

Also read: Google is investing $1 billion in subsea cables connected to Japan

Three additional features of Privacy Pro

The service bundles three additional features that don’t come free. Those three services are a VPN, personal information removal, and identity theft restoration.

You can use the DuckDuckGo browser to initiate the VPN, and it uses a simple connection process to the closest server. The VPN does allow you to choose your connection point in the US, Europe, and Canada if you want to.

DudkDuckGo’s personal information removal feature attracts a lot of people. The service allows you to remove your personal information from people’s search sites. These sites usually require a request to delete your information.

However, DuckDuckGo automatically scans these people’s search sites and once it knows that your information is stored in the data agent’s repository, it will request the deletion for you.

The third feature of the DuckDuckGo Privacy Pro Plan is Identity Theft Recovery, where an advisor is available all day to help you recover from identity-related losses.

This includes financial losses, repairing credit reports by freezing them until your identity is restored and replacing and cancelling items such as driver’s licences, bank cards, and passports.