Free VPN versus paid VPN

The economics

A VPN service pays for servers in many countries and for a great deal of bandwidth, because every byte its customers move passes through it twice. That is an unavoidable, ongoing cost that scales directly with use.

So a free service is covering that somehow. Sometimes it is a limited tier funded by paying customers, which is a straightforward arrangement. Sometimes it is advertising. Sometimes it is the data itself.

What free ones typically cost instead

• Data caps and throttling. The most common and most honest limitation.
• Very few servers. Which usually means a distant, busy one, which is where most VPN slowdown comes from in the first place.
• Logging and resale. The thing you were trying to avoid, from a party you know less about than your internet provider.
• Advertising injected into your browsing. Rarer now, but it has happened.

This is a description of the category, not an accusation against any particular service. Some free tiers are run by reputable companies as a route to a paid product and are fine for what they are.

When free is genuinely fine

If what you want is to protect occasional use on a hotel network, a reputable provider’s free tier does that. The threat model there is the local network, and any working tunnel removes it.

What paying buys

• More servers, closer to you — which is most of the speed difference.
• No data cap.
• A business model that does not depend on your traffic.
• Someone accountable when it stops working.

The thing worth checking either way

Whether the provider has been independently audited, and what their logging policy actually says rather than what the homepage claims. You are choosing who can see your traffic, and that is the only question that really distinguishes one from another.

We do not recommend specific providers, and nothing on this site is sponsored. When that changes it will be labelled. In the meantime, the VPN speed test will tell you what the one you have is actually costing you.