Inspiration
I recently moved to Europe, met a ton of developers, and kept hitting the same wall: how much of the internet is fenced off by where you happen to be. Datasets and services that are one click away in one country are blocked in another, and I could reach before coming here things that here doesn't exist while every VPN wants an always on monthly subscription, when all I ever needed was ten minutes in one country for one task. So I built the opposite: access you buy by the minute, for exactly as long as you need it, and not a second more.
What it does
TempVPN is a VPN you (or your AI agent) buy by the minute with a Tempo no subscription, nothing left running. One command spins up a real WireGuard tunnel, routes your traffic out through a fresh IP in another country, and the session expires on its own when the timer ends. You pay a fraction for exactly the minutes you use, settled machine to machine with no human in the loop. It's a small glimpse of how software behaves once it has a wallet: paying for what it needs the moment it needs it
How we built it
Purely on Rusta and VPN node that unlocks a session once it's paid with mppx over Tempo, and it adds you as a WireGuard peer with its own expiry. A Rust CLI on your side generates the keypair, handles the payment, brings the tunnel up, and runs your program through a loopback-only SOCKS5 proxy so nothing but your traffic rides it. Terraform on GCP stands up each node in minutes, and we used OpenAI's Codex CLI as the agent living inside the tunnel paying its own way out to the internet.
Challenges we ran into
Getting the pay then connect handshake right was fiddlier than it sounds when any piece is off, the request just looks like it hangs forever. The classic VPN plumbing (NAT, routing, firewall rules) ate whole hours, and it took my own internet down more than once while testing one wrong routing rule or an over-eager kill switch, and the laptop's suddenly offline, fixing it from your phone. Making it genuinely leak-proof and getting sessions to tear down cleanly on both ends were hard parts
Accomplishments that we're proud of
It works end to end: pay a couple of cents and seconds later you're on a fresh IP in another country — we confirmed it by watching curl ipinfo.io change location through the tunnel. It's genuinely accountless and keyless: no signup, no API key, no infrastructure left sitting around once you're done. And we held a tight security model even at hackathon speed your key never leaves your machine, the proxy is loopback-only, there's a kill switch, sessions expire server-side all behind a single command.
What we learned
The moment software can pay for itself, the shape of products flips: things that used to need a human account (a VPN, an API key, a server) become something you rent for a minute and forget. That's the real takeaway in the agentic era, infrastructure gets metered and paid for per use by machines, not subscribed to by the month by people. And most of the hard parts of a VPN aren't the crypto, they're the plumbing: routing, NAT
What's next for TempVPN
More nodes in more countries, support for more platforms so any agent on any OS can use it, and TEE-backed nodes that prove we keep no logs. Egress is just the first thing on this rail as we can improve privacy over this
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