How does that get around paying? You don’t pay for the clients but their servers.

They are, but it’s in beta.

You make it sound like they start from scratch with every new game.

The biggest thing that did it for me was who runs Nord? Not business entities but the people.

Protons leadership is out in the open with their names (fwiw their CEO is even on the Higgs paper, lol), but Nord has a very intransparent structure.