Why VPN and emails are hard to operate actually.

Both VPN and email are well understood services, there is no shortage of people with expertise, it is not a big technical challenge to set up and operate...

Each became impossible or unattractive after talking to people who have operated them at deep levels over time. Here is why:

A white label email service provider relates:

• 10 people are needed to respond to CSAM requests, not including lawyers and LE relationship people.
• 30 people deals with spammer. Managing their ASNs, netblocks that get lower reputation on blackhole lists, moving customers to "clean" netblocks when a shared block gets polluted by spammers, etc.

VPNs need to spin-up secure VPN gateways all over the world. Fast while having a pool of providers.
Discussing with a VPN dude: "I asked why keep all the separate brands and marketing if it’s all basically the same thing, and he explained the market is segmented. Some users believe a particular VPN is better for gaming, or business, or torrenting, or porn, or cheapest or whatever. It actually hurt them the couple times they tried to merge brands, so now they try to merge all they can behind the scenes technically but keep the brand identities separate."