Techlore v2026.08: 100+ New VPN Pages, a Smarter Quiz, and a Faster Site

The SPA Tools v2026.08 brings lots of exciting changes across many different areas, so I felt it deserved a blog post! If you haven't tried our tools yet, you definitely should 🙏

1. VPN Finder Has 100+ New VPN pages & More

Every VPN now has its own page (/providers/mullvad/), and many head-to-head comparisons (/compare/ivpn-vs-mullvad/), plus index pages for both. That's currently 108 new URLs where previously the entire VPN Finder lived on just one. This is exciting for a couple of reasons:

1. Some people (especially Javascript-free or Tor users) have issues navigating the VPN data via the chart. Now, each page and the most common comparisons can be accessed as static pages that don't require JS.
2. It's not just better for humans, robots like it too. Right now it's challenging for search engines and LLMs to use our data to recommend people good info. But now, each page can be properly indexed.

For those technical folk: nobody actively maintains these. The whole set is
recomputed from vpns.json on each build. I think is a pretty neat system 😎

Some other updates to the VPN Finder:

• The VPN dataset is now CC BY 4.0, explicitly licensed for reuse with attribution.
• The public submission form to submit/correct data has been hardened to be more secure.
• The VPN Finder has a better JS-free fallback with a simplified JS-free chart + links to JS-free pages.
• A round of community submissions applied across 10 providers, including one new VPN (VPN Unlimited)

2. The Quiz Continues To Improve

Thank you all for submitting amazing feedback on the quiz! To summarize the core changes:

1. New "Report an Issue" button. Clicking it opens a dedicated feedback form with your link pre-filled. Much nicer than the old workflow of "email me your link and what's wrong." It goes without saying, quiz results stay in your browser by default, and even if you click the button, you still have to click 'submit' after entering your feedback for us to ever receive the link.
2. New redesigned action row. The old screenshot-sharing feature was removed for security reasons, and Save-to-Calendar took its place as the primary action on the results screen.
3. Previously, if someone answered that they already use email aliasing, the quiz could still surface to alias their emails. Well that's not very useful! The quiz logic has been updated to fix this.

3. New Recommended Tools

The SPA Tools got a few more services listed so you have even more alternatives to big-tech companies. Welcoming:

• Immich: Self-hosted photos developed by the Futo team.
• DuckDuckGo Email Protection: Another email aliasing option from the DuckDuckGo team.
• Trocador: A no-KYC cryptocurrency exchange provider that makes it easy to swap between countless currencies.

4. The Smaller But Still Needed Updates

• Better accessibility. Contrast now clears AA in both themes across all the new pages. The quiz keyboard navigation and screen-reader support were in conflict
  in two places which has now been fixed.
• Fixed some scrolling issues on the tools page.
• Faster & lighter. It really adds up:
  • /vpn/ layout shift fixed: 0.491 → effectively zero on desktop
  • Stylesheet split into a core bundle plus per-tool bundles, so no page
    downloads another tool's CSS to make things faster
  • Geist font subset: 56.8KB → 20.2KB to reduce load times
  • Per-cell SVG icons replaced with CSS circles for a faster table
• Horizontal scroll jitter fixed in Firefox/Mullvad/Tor and Safari on the VPN chart
• Dead CSS removed: −16.4KB
• New: Turnstile (the CAPTCHA widget on the submission form) now only
  loads when someone actually opens the form, not on every /vpn/ page load
• In my testing, pages load upwards of 50% faster on slower connections!

Andddd that's a wrap for v2026.08! Definitely share any feedback or issues you find 😄 If you're able & willing:

1. Submit data or correct data on the VPN chart. It's only possible because of you all, and the links to contribute exist right below the chart.
2. Give feedback on the quiz using the new "Report an Issue" button so I can continually make the quiz better.

One heads up: v2026.09 may be late, or skipped entirely.

I'm putting a hard freeze on new features to migrate the site to a new stack. Right now it runs on Jekyll (Ruby), with the VPN Finder built as a Preact app bolted on top. My goal is to move everything to a single JS-only static site generator (11ty), and rewriting the VPN Finder as plain JS. That makes it one system instead of two to make things easier to maintain and ultimately a cleaner experience for you all in the long run.

I'll update the changelog once it's done assuming it all goes okay. Thanks for reading and until next time...enjoy the update 🫡

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