Comment by 1dom
Same here, I left NextDNS because I didn't trust it anymore. I started using it personally in homelab and just found it to be randomly a bit sluggish at times. Saw other similar reports. Tried to get support and failed. I saw it trying to sell itself as business capable DNS, and considered if it would fit in at work. Then I got an e-mail giving 7 days for me to disable and move all my logs out of the EU region. I was working at a large fintech firm at the time, and if a vendor had given us 1 week to rearchitect and figure out a new logging solution for DNS, we would have dropped them immediately due to the massive compliance issues they would have created.
The messaging around the change was very much "FYI we're deleting everything in 7 days in that region whether you're good or not, feel free to do what you want", e.g. creating problems with no interest in helping with solutions to those problems. This would all be fine for a free-tier service, but I was a paying customer. Even as a paying customer though, I paid virtually nothing.
Overall, NextDNS felt like it had the worst possible combination startup, passion project and beer money project features: I paid for it for a couple of years and got fed up because the amount talk about it gave the impression to me there was a fair and growing customer base but NextDNS were missing either the capability or focus to grow the service at the time. I'm conscious they'll be reading this - it was 2 years ago this happened, so maybe things have changed.
In the replies to the reddit thread, I'm seeing a lot of people they tell me they moved to Control D. Some people had complaints about latency of the service and other factors, as it seems Control D doesn't have very extensive worldwide coverage.
But, it definitely seems to be the superior option. It's $40 a year more for the full plan, which is unfortunate, but if they offer more options, better customer support and etc it is probably worth it. NextDNS is $20 and standard Control D is the same price. NextDNS does work, but there is seemingly no support whatsoever.
I came across a Stacksocial coupon that offers $40/yr for the standard plan, so I'm tempted between the two options. The standard option doesn't offer changing location via DNS. That may not be important if you're already using a DNS, but it would be nice to have.
I bought a RPi5 with the intention of turning it into a PiHole but never got around to it, and I don't believe you can use your PiHole's DNS outside of your LAN (for example, if you use it on your mobile device and leave your local wifi, it can't connect to it's local IP).