DuckDuckGo, the consumer tech company focusing on privacy, on Monday introduced a new Privacy Pro subscription that offered VPN service, personal information removal and identity theft restoration to its users.
The offer, which costs $9.99 per month, is available only for users in the U.S, while the annual fee is $99. It is the company's first move to add a subscription product within its DuckDuckGo browser.

DuckDuckGo has been profitable since 2014, but to date, it was reliant on ad revenue. The subscription service opens up a whole new avenue for the company to make money.

The VPN relies on the free, open source WireGuard protocol to ensure your identity is safe while visiting various sites on the Internet. Moreover, the company also claimed that all DNS queries are routed through DuckDuckGo's own DNS resolvers and thus, ISPs cannot snoop over your browsing history.

With the personal information removal service of DuckDuckGo, it scans dozens of data broker sites to find details like your name and address. If the service finds your details on any of these sites, it requests removal and handles email correspondence with them.

The company claims it "stands on the technology of Removaly, a startup DuckDuckGo purchased in 2022. (At the time, Removaly founder Kyle Krzeski posted on X, citing that a privacy company had purchased the startup, without naming the company.)

The third feature of DuckDuckGo's privacy pro plan is identity theft restoration where an adviser would help you recover your identity-related loss around the clock. This would include financial losses, fix credit reports by even freezing the report until identity is restored, and replace and cancel items such as driver's licenses, bank cards, and passports. The company said that the recovery agent would work with you, deal with all the formalities, and follow up with various companies.

DuckDuckGo does not log any user activity through its VPN and keeps information garnered during the process of removing personal information on a local machine, while signing up for Privacy Pro gives users a randomly assigned ID.

This year, DuckDuckGo added cross-device syncing for passwords and bookmarks for easier access to that information.

This year, some filings in the U.S. Department of Justice versus Google case uncovered that DuckDuckGo, a search engine, accounted for 2.5% general search queries in the U.S. in 2021 and between 0.5% to 2.5% in Europe in 2023.