Replace your DIY privacy stack: 1Blocker + Mullvad + NextDNS in one app

Bottom line up front: 1Blocker, Mullvad, and NextDNS are each individually excellent. If you're happy running three apps, keep running three apps — there's no urgent reason to switch. The case for consolidation is specific: one bill instead of three, one config surface instead of three, network-layer filtering across every app instead of Safari-only, plus a few capabilities (ML-based zero-day phishing detection, decoy traffic generation, native per-app routing) that the DIY stack genuinely doesn't have. The case against consolidation is also specific: Mullvad's anonymous-by-design accounts, 1Blocker's cosmetic filtering in Safari, NextDNS's deep configurability, and Mullvad's niche power-user features (PQ-WireGuard, DAITA, MultiHop) are all real things you'd give up. We'll spell out both sides and let you decide.

We're not going to dunk on the DIY stack. The people running 1Blocker + Mullvad + NextDNS are, statistically, the most privacy-literate readers we have. They picked good tools for good reasons. The question this post answers is the one they've already asked themselves: "can I just consolidate this?" The answer is "yes, for most of you, with these specific caveats." Here are the caveats.

What the DIY stack actually gives you

Before we talk about replacing the stack, let's be clear about what it does — because each of these tools earns its place, and the reasons people pick them are sound. If you're reading this and you don't already run all three, the rest of the post will make more sense once you understand what each one is good at.

1Blocker

1Blocker is a Safari content blocker for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. It uses Apple's Content Blocker API, which means it ships its filter rules to Safari at install time and the filtering happens entirely inside Safari's render pipeline. The trade-off is that 1Blocker only protects Safari — it has no visibility into Chrome, Firefox, the YouTube app, Instagram, or any other non-Safari traffic — but in exchange it costs essentially zero battery, zero CPU at request time, and never proxies your traffic through a third party. It also does cosmetic filtering: blank ad-shaped boxes get hidden so the page doesn't have ugly gaps. It's a one-time purchase or a small annual fee, and it's the single best Safari-only tool on the App Store.

Mullvad

Mullvad is, by reputation, the most privacy-respecting VPN on the consumer market. The account model is the headline: you sign up with no email, no name, no payment-method-tied-to-identity — just a 16-digit account number that Mullvad generates for you. You can mail them cash if you want. They charge a flat €5/month (no annual discounts, no upsells, no growth-hacking tier confusion), they've passed independent security audits, and their no-log claim was tested in the real world when Swedish police executed a search warrant at their offices in 2023 and left empty-handed because there was no customer data to seize. They run WireGuard with post-quantum-resistant key exchange (PQ-WireGuard), they ship DAITA (Defense Against AI-guided Traffic Analysis) for traffic-pattern obfuscation, and they support MultiHop double-VPN routing. For users whose threat model includes hiding the existence of payment from their VPN provider, there is no better option.

NextDNS

NextDNS is a self-service DNS resolver with the configurability of a small enterprise security product. You point your devices at a NextDNS endpoint (DoH, DoT, or the legacy IP) and every DNS query passes through their filtering engine before resolution. You get hundreds of blocklists to toggle, custom allow/deny rules, parental controls, per-profile configurations (kids vs. adults vs. work), TLD-level rules, logging granularity, AI-driven threat intelligence feeds, and a query log you can replay. At $1.99/month for the 300k-query tier, it's a steal for what it does. It works on every device that supports encrypted DNS, which is essentially every modern device. The catch: DNS-level filtering can't see traffic where the application speaks DoH directly to a third-party resolver (Brave, Firefox with DoH enabled, any app that hardcodes Cloudflare or Google DNS) — those queries bypass NextDNS entirely.

Total cost

Roughly $7–9/month in subscription costs, plus 1Blocker's one-time or annual fee. Three accounts to manage, three apps to keep updated, three configuration surfaces. For a tech-literate user this isn't onerous — it's just real. The maintenance cost is small but nonzero, and the cognitive cost of "wait, did I configure that on NextDNS or Mullvad?" is the thing readers are usually trying to solve when they ask about consolidation.

The seams between the three apps — what falls through them

Three apps working together aren't the same as one app covering the same ground. The DIY stack has real seams — places where the responsibilities overlap, where coverage drops, or where the user has to manually reconcile two different sources of truth. Some of these don't matter; some of them do.

Overlap: Mullvad's DNS filtering vs. NextDNS. Mullvad ships a built-in "DNS content blocking" feature in their app that filters trackers, ads, malware, adult content, gambling, and social media at the DNS layer. If you also run NextDNS, you have two DNS-level filters competing for the same resolver path. In practice, one wins (whichever you've pointed your system DNS at), and the other is wasted. You're paying twice for filtering you only use once.

Coverage gap: 1Blocker only protects Safari. Every other browser, every native app, every embedded webview on your phone — Instagram in-app browser, Twitter's link previewer, the YouTube app, Slack, every news app — has no 1Blocker protection. Mullvad and NextDNS catch some of this at the DNS layer, but only when the app uses system DNS (more on this in a moment). 1Blocker is doing real work for the share of your time you spend in Safari, and zero work for the rest.

Coverage gap: DoH-in-browser bypasses NextDNS. Brave and Firefox (with DoH enabled, which is increasingly the default) send DNS queries directly to Cloudflare or another configured resolver instead of using system DNS. That means NextDNS — which depends on being your system DNS — sees nothing for traffic from those browsers. The filter rules you painstakingly configured at NextDNS apply to your iOS apps, but not to your laptop's Brave browsing.

Operational seams. Three apps means three update cycles (and three apps that occasionally break each other after an OS update). Three subscriptions on three billing dates. Three sets of credentials, three apps to reauthenticate when you set up a new device. No unified dashboard for "what got blocked today" — if you want to know whether NextDNS or 1Blocker caught a specific request, you check two different log views.

None of these seams are fatal. People run this stack happily for years. But they're the specific friction that consolidation removes, and if you've noticed any of them you're not imagining it.

What you give up by consolidating to Casper

This is the section that gets skipped in most "switch to our product" pieces. We're going to be explicit, because if you migrate without understanding what you're giving up, you'll be unhappy a month in and we'd rather you be happy. Here's the honest list.

Mullvad's anonymous-by-design account model

Casper has email-based accounts. We need an email so we can send you receipts, password resets, and security notifications — standard SaaS hygiene. Mullvad doesn't: you get a 16-digit number, you pay with cash if you want, and Mullvad genuinely does not know who you are. If your threat model includes hiding from your VPN provider the fact that you have a VPN provider — journalists working with sensitive sources, activists in surveilled environments, people who specifically chose Mullvad because of the 16-digit number — Mullvad wins this comparison and you should keep it. For most readers, this is a real but small loss. For some readers, it's the entire decision.

1Blocker's cosmetic filtering in Safari

Casper filters at the DNS layer, which means an ad request never resolves and the ad slot on the page stays empty — visually, you see a blank box where an ad would have been. 1Blocker uses Safari's Content Blocker API to additionally rewrite the page's layout so the blank box collapses and the page looks clean. We can't do that from the DNS layer alone, and Casper doesn't ship a Safari content blocker extension today. The good news: you can run both. Apple's Content Blocker API is additive; 1Blocker and Casper coexist without conflict. Many of our power users keep 1Blocker installed solely for Safari cosmetic cleanup and let Casper cover the other 95% of their device's network traffic.

NextDNS's deep configurability

NextDNS is essentially a self-service DNS resolver with thousands of toggle options — block-by-TLD, regex rules, per-profile filtering, hundreds of community-maintained blocklists you can mix and match, schedule-based rules ("block social media 9am–5pm on weekdays"), and granular query logging with replay. Casper has good defaults — the filter lists we maintain catch the same tracker-and-malware-and-phishing traffic NextDNS catches with its default Pro settings — but we don't expose hundreds of knobs. If you have spent the last two years tuning a NextDNS profile with custom regex rules and exotic blocklists, those configurations don't translate 1:1 and you should keep NextDNS.

PQ-WireGuard, DAITA, and MultiHop

Mullvad runs three niche power-user features that aren't on Casper's roadmap. PQ-WireGuard adds a post-quantum key exchange (Classic McEliece) on top of WireGuard's standard handshake, hedging against future quantum decryption of recorded traffic. DAITA is Mullvad's traffic-pattern obfuscation layer for defeating AI-guided traffic analysis. MultiHop chains your traffic through two Mullvad servers in different jurisdictions, raising the bar for any single observer to deanonymize you. Casper has its own approach to traffic-analysis resistance (see what is a decoy network), but if you specifically chose Mullvad for these three features, Casper isn't a like-for-like replacement on that axis.

The honest summary

You give up roughly 10–15% of niche functionality in exchange for one app, one bill, and one config surface. For most readers, that's a good trade. For some readers — specifically the ones whose threat model requires anonymous payment, or whose workflow depends on NextDNS-grade configurability — it isn't. We'd rather you know that before you migrate than after.

What you gain by consolidating to Casper

Here's the other side of the ledger — the things Casper does that the DIY stack genuinely doesn't, not the things we do as well as them.

ML-based zero-day phishing detection

Mullvad's content filtering is blocklist-based. NextDNS is blocklist-based (with optional AI threat feeds layered on). 1Blocker is rule-based. All three depend on someone, somewhere, having already identified a malicious domain and published it to a list before your device gets a chance to ask about it. That works well for known threats; it fails for the phishing kit that went live six hours ago and hasn't hit a blocklist yet. Casper runs an ML classifier that scores domains in real time on observable signals — domain age, TLD reputation, certificate transparency log behavior, lexical similarity to known brand domains, hosting ASN reputation, redirect chain structure — and catches phishing infrastructure before it lands on a public blocklist. This is the single capability gap that consolidating actually improves coverage on, not just reorganizes.

Decoy traffic generation

Mullvad's DAITA targets the same threat — traffic analysis at the metadata level — but uses a different approach (per-packet padding and pattern smoothing). Casper's Decoy Domains feature generates plausible fake DNS queries and HTTP requests that mix with your real traffic in the VPN tunnel, raising the noise floor against any observer trying to reconstruct your browsing from connection metadata. NextDNS and 1Blocker don't address this dimension at all. We wrote up the details in our decoy network explainer.

Native mobile apps with per-app routing controls

Casper ships first-class native apps for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and Android, with per-app split-tunneling rules built into the GUI. You can route Slack outside the VPN (because your work expects a stable IP), route your banking app through a specific exit country, route a region-locked streaming app through that region's exit — all from a settings pane that lives next to the toggle that turned the VPN on. Mullvad ships native apps too, but their per-app config UX is leaner. NextDNS has no app-routing concept because it isn't a VPN. 1Blocker has no app-routing concept because it isn't a network tool.

One subscription, every device

With Casper, one subscription covers your iPhone, your iPad, your MacBook, your partner's Android phone, and the spare device you keep for travel. With the DIY stack, you're paying Mullvad per active connection (they're generous with 5 device limits, but it's still bounded), paying NextDNS on the query-volume tier that fits your household, and either re-buying 1Blocker for each Apple ID or sharing via Family Sharing where supported. The cost difference at three devices is small. At ten devices in a family, it isn't.

What each tool actually does — at a glance

Here's the breakdown of capabilities by tool, so you can see at a glance where each one earns its place and where Casper covers the same ground.

The migration playbook (if you decide to consolidate)

If you've decided to consolidate, here's the playbook for a clean migration without losing protection during the cutover. The principle is "don't tear down what works until you've confirmed the replacement covers it" — run Casper alongside your existing stack for the first month, then decommission tools one at a time.

Step 1: Install Casper, run the trial alongside everything else

Install Casper on one device — your primary phone is usually the right choice. Don't uninstall anything yet. For the first 24 hours, just let it run. You're looking for unexpected breakage: apps that refuse to connect, sites that fail to load, anything that wasn't broken before. In our experience this is rare, but it does happen, and it's better to discover it on day one than day twenty.

Step 2: Verify DNS-layer filtering is actually Casper's

With Casper running, visit dnsleaktest.com and run the extended test. The resolver should resolve to Casper's DNS infrastructure, not NextDNS, Cloudflare, or your ISP's resolver. If you still see NextDNS in the leak test, your system DNS is still pointed there and you need to remove the NextDNS DoH profile from iOS Settings → General → VPN & Device Management (or the equivalent on your platform). Until you do this, you're not actually testing Casper — you're testing two filters stacked.

Step 3: Verify the VPN tunnel is Casper's, not Mullvad's

iOS and macOS will helpfully use whichever VPN profile was active last, but if both Casper and Mullvad are installed, only one can be on at a time. Confirm Casper is the active tunnel by checking the system VPN indicator and visiting any IP-geolocation site — you should see Casper's exit IP in the location you selected, not Mullvad's exit IP. If you see Mullvad's, disable the Mullvad profile and reactivate Casper.

Step 4: Migrate custom rules

Open NextDNS and list your custom denylist and allowlist entries. These don't import automatically — Casper uses a different rule format — but the lists themselves are usually short (most NextDNS users have between 10 and 50 custom entries) and porting them by hand is the work of fifteen minutes. Add Casper's equivalents in the app's filter management UI. Don't migrate your blocklist subscriptions — Casper's default filter lists cover the same ground as NextDNS's recommended defaults, and double-stacking community blocklists tends to cause more false positives than it prevents.

Step 5: Cancel NextDNS first

NextDNS is the cheapest of the three and the least sticky — there's no client lock-in, no device limit, nothing that ties you down. Cancel it first, give it a week, and see whether anything breaks. If something does (a site you trust is suddenly being filtered, or a domain that should be filtered isn't), you'll know it's a Casper-vs-NextDNS coverage delta worth investigating. If nothing breaks, you've validated that Casper covers what NextDNS was doing for you.

Step 6: Run Casper-only for two weeks

With NextDNS gone and 1Blocker still installed (1Blocker doesn't conflict with anything; leave it for now), run on Casper + Mullvad for a week, then disable Mullvad's app and run Casper-only for another week. Note any sites that break, any apps that refuse to authenticate, any region-locked services that suddenly don't work. Most users have zero issues at this stage; the ones who do usually find that a specific banking app or work tool needs to be added to per-app split-tunnel exceptions.

Step 7: Cancel Mullvad (but keep the account number)

Cancel your Mullvad subscription but save the 16-digit account number somewhere safe (a password manager note works fine). Mullvad accounts can be reactivated by topping them up, so if you ever decide you want it back, you don't need to re-onboard from scratch — you just add a month of credit and the account is live again. This is genuinely useful for the rare cases where you need Mullvad's specific anonymous-payment property for a specific task.

Step 8: Decide on 1Blocker

1Blocker is the cheapest of the three and the only one that doesn't conflict with Casper. Two reasonable choices: (a) keep it for Safari cosmetic filtering (the blank-ad-slot cleanup), or (b) remove it if you don't care about cosmetic gaps. Either is defensible. Our recommendation: keep it. The marginal cost is tiny and it complements Casper rather than overlapping with it.

When NOT to consolidate

We've been honest about what you give up. Here are the specific reader profiles for whom the DIY stack is the correct answer and Casper isn't:

• High-threat-model users where anonymous payment is load-bearing. Journalists working with sources whose safety depends on no record of payment to a VPN provider. Activists in jurisdictions where merely subscribing to a privacy tool draws attention. Surveillance targets. If you're in this category, you already know — and Mullvad's 16-digit-number model is built for you specifically. Keep it.
• Power users with a heavily-tuned NextDNS profile. If you've spent two years building custom rules, regex filters, per-profile schedules, and a curated blocklist subscription set, those configurations don't translate cleanly. The migration cost is high and the gain is marginal. Keep NextDNS.
• Safari-only users. If your phone is 95% Safari and you don't care about the other 5%, 1Blocker at near-zero marginal cost is doing most of the work and you don't need a network-layer tool on top.
• Small businesses or families with multiple per-user DNS profiles. NextDNS supports separate profiles per family member with separate filter sets out of the box. Casper does this differently (per-device, per-app), and if your existing NextDNS profile structure is load-bearing for your household, the migration is a downgrade.
• Users specifically running Mullvad for PQ-WireGuard, DAITA, or MultiHop. If you chose Mullvad for these features specifically — not for the VPN tunnel in general, but for the three features Casper doesn't have — Casper is not a like-for-like replacement on those axes.

We'd rather you stay on the DIY stack and be well-served than migrate to Casper and be disappointed. The whole point of this post is to help you make the right call, not the call that benefits us.

The honest cost comparison

Here's what the monthly subscription math actually looks like. We've used Mullvad's published €5/month rate at recent EUR/USD conversions, NextDNS's $1.99 entry-level tier, and 1Blocker's annual subscription amortized to monthly. Casper's price is shown with a placeholder; check our pricing page for the current number.

*Casper doesn't ship a Safari content blocker — "included" here refers to the network-layer filtering that overlaps with 1Blocker's domain coverage, not Safari's cosmetic page rewriting. Many users keep 1Blocker for Safari cleanup; the marginal cost is negligible.

The dollar figures are close enough that price isn't really the deciding factor at the individual subscriber level. The real benefit is the column on the right — three apps, three bills, and three accounts collapse to one. For people who value their time and attention, that's the trade. For people who specifically value the things in this column on the left (anonymous payment, deep configurability, niche WireGuard variants), the answer is different.

Why we'd ship Casper to ourselves

We built Casper because we got tired of running our own DIY stack. The first version of this product was, literally, three of us running Mullvad + NextDNS + 1Blocker on our personal devices and grumbling about it on Slack. The consolidation case isn't a sales pitch we invented to justify the product — it's the version of the privacy stack we wanted for ourselves and couldn't find. Building it became the path of least resistance.

That's also why this post is so honest about what the DIY stack still does better in specific scenarios. We use Mullvad ourselves in the cases where anonymous payment matters. We keep 1Blocker installed for Safari cleanup. We respect NextDNS — half of our engineering team came out of the same DNS-resolver-as-service mental model. Casper isn't trying to obsolete these tools; it's trying to be the right answer for the readers who don't need every feature of every tool, and would rather have one good app than three excellent ones.

A three-question decision framework

If you've made it this far and you're still on the fence, here's the framework we'd actually use to decide. Three questions, in order:

1. How many privacy apps am I currently running? If it's fewer than two, consolidation isn't your problem and Casper isn't urgent — pick the single best tool for your specific use case (likely Mullvad for VPN-only or NextDNS for filtering-only) and stop. The consolidation case is built on the friction of running three apps; it doesn't apply if you're running one.
2. Do I have niche power-user requirements? Specifically: anonymous payment, post-quantum WireGuard, MultiHop double-VPN, or a heavily-tuned NextDNS configuration. If yes, keep the DIY stack — Casper genuinely doesn't replace those features today, and we'd rather you not migrate and regret it. If no, move to question three.
3. Do I want one bill and one config surface? If yes, Casper is the answer. If you'd actively prefer three apps (some people like the redundancy, the diversification of trust across three providers, or just the granular control of separate tools), the DIY stack is fine — there's no wrong answer here.

For the readers in the middle — three apps, no niche requirements, tired of the operational overhead — that's the audience this post is for. The consolidation case is built for you specifically. The migration playbook above is the lowest-risk path to test it.

Related reading: Casper vs. Mullvad for the head-to-head VPN comparison, Casper vs. NextDNS for the DNS-layer comparison, Casper vs. 1Blocker for the Safari-specific comparison, how Casper's threat protection works, what is a decoy network, and WireGuard vs. OpenVPN if you want to understand the tunnel protocol all four tools rely on. For the broader threat-modeling context, the EFF Surveillance Self-Defense guide is still the best free resource on the internet.