From Minecraft Frustration to 10 Million Monthly Users: The Story of Bypass.City

I started Bypass.City because ad websites drove me absolutely crazy. Imagine watching a YouTube tutorial on video editing, and just as you’re excited to grab the template file the creator promised, you’re thrust into a maze of intrusive ads and malware threats. Or imagine simply wanting to download something useful, only to have your browser hijacked by a stream of dangerous pop-ups. That’s the exact frustration I faced back when I was a kid playing Minecraft. Mods and resources on sites like CurseForge would redirect through services like AdFly, forcing users through multiple ad-filled links, many laden with malware. Out of sheer annoyance, I decided there had to be a better way.

In August 2021, when I was still in sixth grade, I wrote my first Tampermonkey script. It was a simple user script designed to bypass these aggravating ad links. Originally, I shared it with a small group, but it quickly ballooned into a Discord community of thousands, with the user script itself amassing over 200,000 installations. Seeing this growth, users began asking for a web-based solution—something easy to use from any device. So, in April 2022, on April Fool’s Day no less, Bypass.City was officially born.

From day one, the philosophy behind Bypass.City has been clear: create a freer internet, one where accessing information doesn’t mean battling through malicious ads or risking malware infections. Unlike most solutions, which overload their websites with pop-ups, we took a unique “ad-optional” route. A simple toggle button in the corner of our website allows users to completely disable ads if they choose. Users loved it, and this model became a defining aspect of Bypass.City.

Growing Bypass.City into a major tech solution wasn’t always smooth sailing. Initially, scaling from 100,000 to 1 million users required handling significant technical challenges. A turning point came when a major ad website rolled out a challenging patch. Competitors scrambled, taking weeks to fix their services. We resolved it within just 24 hours. This responsiveness won us trust and rapidly grew our user base.

Another explosive growth moment arrived unexpectedly when an ad website decided to restrict users to just three links per day. Frustrated users flooded to Bypass.City, driving our user count from 1 million to 3 million almost overnight. Scaling our infrastructure to cope with this traffic was intense—we spent sleepless nights rewriting code and spinning up new servers.

The biggest leap happened when multiple ad sites released another massive patch, effectively disabling all competing services for months. This positioned Bypass.City as the only working solution on the market, catapulting us from 3 million to over 7 million users, and then steadily upward to our current 10 million monthly users.

At its core, Bypass.City runs on a lean but robust technical stack. Our frontend is built with Next.js and Mantine, delivering a clean, responsive experience. On the backend, we use NestJS with extensive custom tooling, all hosted efficiently in Docker containers on a Linux VPS. Requests flow seamlessly through our specialized request-handling modules, significantly compressing traffic to reduce costs and enhance speed. Our database, a PostgreSQL instance managed through Prisma, stores only bypass results and essential telemetry—no personal user data whatsoever.

One of our proudest innovations is our custom-built CAPTCHA solver. Third-party solvers typically cost thousands monthly; ours operates at negligible cost by leveraging proprietary AI-driven solutions. Another “secret sauce” innovation is our internally developed proxy infrastructure. This setup enables highly efficient traffic management at a fraction of standard market costs, directly supporting our capacity to handle millions of monthly requests.

The real-world impact of Bypass.City is immense. With tens of millions of ad links bypassed monthly, we estimate savings of millions of dollars for users by preventing malware infections and associated damages. These aren’t abstract benefits—I’ve personally witnessed friends and classmates unknowingly using my site, not realizing its creator was sitting right beside them.

Yet the greatest rewards come from our community. Our Trustpilot reviews highlight not just our speed or innovative monetization model but the genuine gratitude users have for providing a safer, cleaner internet. Behind every weekend spent coding through sleepless nights is the knowledge that we’re tangibly improving lives.

Looking ahead, the future of Bypass.City is ambitious. Our next major step is entering the broader ad-blocking market, specifically browser extensions. Current ad-blockers fall short when faced with ad-link sites. We aim to integrate our bypass technology into a full-featured ad-blocker extension, creating a complete solution that covers every aspect of ad and malware protection online.

Building and scaling Bypass.City has been a journey filled with challenges, innovation, and impactful moments. But at its heart remains our core vision: a freer, safer internet accessible to all. That’s what continues to drive me every day.

Reviewed by: Dr. Jonathan Kenigson, FRSA
Statement of Review: The content of this article is free of material error and merits publication due to its prodigious industrial applications.
Author Attribution: https://bypass.city/about