It wasn't that long ago that there was some sort of hope that after Tet that the Vietnamese government was going to change the tourist-visa policy back to a 3-month visa or perhaps even 1-year visa for people from certain countries. As it stands now the only tourist visa available is the 30 day visa, which to people that are trying to live here is not nearly enough.
Visa runs are immensely popular right now but not because people actually want to go on them. They are doing them because they have to. I've been on a couple of these and they really suck if you don't live near a border.
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I suppose it would be ok if you only needed to do one or perhaps two of them but I know people that have been doing these every month for the past year and they always say something along the lines of that they didn't realize that 30 days could pass by so quickly.
It isn't just that you have to sit on a bus for 12 hours or more, it is the fact that the visa to enter Laos is $30 and the visa to come immediately back into Vietnam is another $25. The visa run itself also costs around $60 so by the time you are all set and done you have probably spent quite a bit of money just for an additional 30 days in Vietnam.
For a lot of people this is still economical because Vietnam is still by far the most economically viable country in the area that actually has infrastructure but you are going to have to start asking yourself whether or not you value you time.
The rumor about the country returning to a 90-day visa has as of yet proven to be just a rumor and there doesn't seem to be much movement to make this rumor any sort of reality.
There are a lot of people that are already leaving Vietnam to pursue being digital nomads elsewhere and honestly, at this point I don't think it will be too terribly long before I end up being one of them. I fail to understand why a country that is as poor as this one - no offense intended of course - would ever be interested in chasing relatively affluent members of society out of the country. The condo owners and local restaurants definitely don't want this to happen but at this point it almost seems inevitable.
So for now, there is no tourist visa to Vietnam other than the standard 30-day one. I wouldn't recommend anyone out there thinking of setting up shop as a digital nomad do so in this country unless they are prepared to do a bunch of rather boring travel once every 4 weeks. It's lame, but that is just the way that it is.
We can only hope that someone comes along and changes it but as of now, there doesn't appear to be any movement in that direction and a lot of digital nomads are packing up and moving to other countries. I may soon become one of them