Will transfers go faster if I pay you?

You may be able to improve your connections, but performance is not related to your account or subscription level.

In the best case scenario, and in most cases, ZeroTier connects peer-to-peer and none of your network traffic travels through our servers. This means transfers go as fast as your CPU & network can compress, encrypt and send packets, and how fast the remote end can receive them.

Network Resources

There are some cases, such as hostile NATs & firewalls in which your encrypted packets do indeed get relayed through our root servers. Relaying through our root adds latency. The packets must travel farther physically than they would for a direct, peer to peer connection.

We do not throttle any of these packets, nor can we read the contents of the packets due to encryption. We also, however, cannot guarantee connection reliability when this happens. We do our best effort to get your packets where they need to go, but this is not always possible.

See https://zerotier.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SD/pages/6815768 for more information on how to resolve such issues.

CPU Resources

ZeroTier uses modern cryptography and has similar performance to tunnels such as OpenVPN, IPSec, Wireguard.

ZeroTier on a low powered, embedded device may not reach your full line speed.

ZeroTier uses hardware AES acceleration when available.

Why is a ZeroTier interface reporting a 10 or 100Mbps link speed?

It’s a virtual interface. It’s not really limited to that number.

https://zerotier.atlassian.net/l/cp/L00M0vC0