For travellers to mainland China
The day you land, half your phone stops working — and the websites that would sell you a fix are blocked as well. Sailnet takes about four minutes to set up at home, and it keeps your mail, your maps and your team chat reachable from the other side.
01 / THE PROBLEM
That’s what makes it confusing. Pages load. Speed tests pass. It’s only your things that don’t: the mail client spins, the map is a grey rectangle, the group chat has been silent since the plane.
This is the part travellers get wrong. The app store listing, the download page, the company you were going to pay — all commonly unreachable from inside. You cannot solve this after you arrive.
Installed, funded and tested at home, while everything still works. Ten minutes of preparation before the flight replaces a week of borrowing someone’s hotspot.
Do this first
Install on every device you’re travelling with, put a couple of dollars of credit in it, and connect once to confirm it works — all before you leave. A tool you have never tested is not a tool, it’s a hope.
02 / WHAT YOU GET BACK
Gmail, Outlook, Proton, your company’s webmail
Messaging
WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, Messenger
Work
Slack, Notion, Google Docs, Drive, GitHub, Figma
Getting around
Google Maps, ride and transit apps, translation
Video & audio
YouTube, Spotify, video calls with the family
Social
Instagram, X, Reddit, LinkedIn
Money
Your bank’s app and its login checks
The news
The publications you read at home
Nothing here is a special feature. It is simply what the internet looks like when your connection leaves the country before it fetches a page.
03 / WHY NOT AN ORDINARY VPN
When you buy a subscription, one business knows your name, your card, your home address and every site you opened through them. That record exists whether or not anyone ever asks for it. Sailnet is built so that record is never created in the first place — there is no company in the middle, no account, and no list of customers that could be leaked, sold or demanded.
| A typical paid VPN | Sailnet | |
|---|---|---|
| To start | Email, password, a card, a subscription | Install it. There is nothing to sign up for. |
| What you pay | A fixed monthly fee, whether you travel or not | A few cents per gigabyte, only while you use it |
| Who can see your browsing | The company running the servers | No single relay ever sees both who you are and where you went |
| If they’re breached or compelled | Your identity and history are in one place | There is no central place, and no identity attached |
| Who runs it | One business, one set of servers | Independent volunteers, paid automatically per megabyte |
| Cancelling | Remember to, or keep being billed | Stop using it. Unspent credit is yours. |
04 / IN PLAIN ENGLISH
Think of a letter in three nested envelopes. You hand it to the first person, who can see it came from you but not what it says or where it ends up. They pass the inner envelope to a second, who knows neither end. The third opens the last envelope and posts it — and has no idea who wrote it. Your request travels through three independent computers run by three unrelated people, and no one of them can put your name next to the page you asked for.
You
Your laptop or phone
Relay 1
Sees you. Not your destination.
Relay 2
Sees neither end.
Relay 3
Sees the destination. Not you.
The web
The page you wanted
Each relay is, genuinely, a working website with a real certificate. To anything watching the network, your connection resembles a normal encrypted visit to a normal site — not the recognisable signature most VPNs leave behind.
Relays aren’t published on a company’s server that can be taken offline. They announce themselves on a public ledger, and they tell each other. Block a few and the rest are still there.
If the usual doors are shut, Sailnet supports bridges: unlisted entry points shared privately, by invitation. Worth getting one before you travel, the way you’d carry a spare key.
05 / WHAT IT COSTS
There is no monthly fee, because there is nobody to pay monthly. Your device pays the relays automatically, by the megabyte, as you use them — fractions of a cent at a time. A fortnight of mail, messaging, maps, documents and ordinary browsing is typically a couple of gigabytes: well under a dollar. Video is what actually costs money, and even then it’s cents per film, not a subscription.
A digital currency chosen for one boring, useful reason: transfers are instant and cost nothing, so paying a tenth of a cent actually works. The app shows you where to get some.
Nothing links the connection to your identity, and no payment can be declined, frozen or reversed at the worst possible moment — which is a real failure mode for subscriptions bought abroad.
It lives in a wallet on your own device. Nobody can suspend it. The flip side is that nobody can recover it either, so back up the recovery phrase the app shows you — on paper, before you fly.
Exact prices are set by each relay operator and shift with demand and the XNO exchange rate, so treat these as the ballpark they are, not a quote.
06 / PRE-FLIGHT
01
Phone and laptop both. The phone matters most — it’s what you’ll have in a taxi at midnight when the map won’t load.
02
The app shows it once, under Settings → Back up wallet. On paper, in your bag — not a screenshot in the photo roll. There is no support line that can restore it for you.
03
More than you think you need; topping up is easier from home. Two or three dollars covers an ordinary trip comfortably.
04
The single step people skip and regret. Turn it on at home, open a site, confirm it works, turn it off. Now you know.
05
Ask for a bridge line and save it somewhere you can reach offline. And bring one unrelated backup tool. Anyone who tells you a single method always works is selling something.
07 / HONEST LIMITS
Every product in this category overstates its case, and travellers make real decisions on the strength of it. So here is the unflattering half, stated plainly.
Sailnet is built to resist censorship and every technique described here is in the shipped code — but the project has not yet run measurements from inside a censored network. We are not going to imply field results we don’t have. Treat it as promising and untested there, and carry a backup.
Filtering changes, and it tightens around sensitive dates and in some regions more than others. A method that worked last month may not this month. This is true of every service on the market, including the expensive ones.
Sign in to your own email and that account is still yours. Sailnet hides the path your traffic takes; it cannot un-tell a service who you are once you’ve told it.
A phone someone else has handled, a device you were asked to install something on, or a borrowed laptop is outside what any network tool can fix.
China regulates VPN services, and running an unauthorised one is unlawful there. Enforcement has overwhelmingly targeted operators and sellers rather than travellers using a tool for ordinary work and contact with home, but that is a description of past practice, not a promise about your trip. Nothing here is legal advice — if the stakes are high for you, get advice that is.
All of it is open source, including the parts above. That is the only reason you should believe any of this rather than take our word for it.
08 / QUESTIONS
Assume not. Download pages, app store listings and the sites of most providers are commonly unreachable from inside, and that includes ours. If you are already there and reading this, you got lucky — install it now, this minute, rather than later today.
Usually yes for calls and normal browsing. Your traffic takes a longer road than usual — three relays, often on other continents — so expect more lag than your home connection and occasional variation depending on which relays your device picks. It is a working connection, not a fast one.
No. The app makes the wallet for you, shows you where to buy a few dollars of credit, and spends it automatically. You need to do exactly one crypto-flavoured thing: write down the recovery phrase on paper. There are no fees and no transaction to approve.
The Android app fails closed. If the tunnel can’t start, traffic stops rather than quietly falling back to the open network — so a dropout is visible and obvious instead of silent.
The routing idea is similar — several hops, no one of which sees both ends. The differences are that relays here are paid automatically for the bandwidth they carry, which is meant to keep enough of them running, and that the connection is shaped to resemble ordinary website traffic.
Yes. On Android it covers everything the phone does. On desktop it runs as a local proxy for your browser, with an optional whole-device mode, plus extensions for Chrome and Firefox that flip it on and off.
There is nothing to trial, because there is nothing to subscribe to. Install it and put a dollar in; if you don’t like it, you’ve spent a dollar and there is no account left behind to close.
Yes, and it pays. A relay on a spare server or a home PC earns automatically for every megabyte it carries. More relays make the network harder to block for everyone — but run one from home, not from inside a country that restricts it.
09 / DOWNLOAD
Android
Sailnet-Android.apk →
Windows
Sailnet-Windows.exe →
macOS · Apple silicon
Sailnet.dmg →
macOS · Intel
Sailnet.dmg →
Linux
sailnode →
Chrome extension
sailnet-chrome.zip →
Firefox extension
sailnet-firefox.zip →
Everything else
All releases →
Every file has a published checksum beside it so you can verify you got what we shipped. On macOS the first launch needs right-click → Open, and on Windows you may see SmartScreen’s “Run anyway”: the builds are not yet signed with a paid certificate.
