Open-source VPNs

Windscribe asks less of you than almost anything else you can buy. Registration takes no email address and no password. One subscription covers as many devices as you own, free tier included. And if you only ever connect to three countries, you can buy three rather than the whole network, which is a pricing idea nobody else has tried. The ease of use and the value both come from the same instinct: charge honestly, and ask for nothing you do not need.

Its privacy case rests on something harder to fake than a promise. The company publishes a running count of legal requests received and complied with, and the second number has stayed at zero because there has never been anything on the servers to hand over — a position it has held through actual court proceedings, and again when police seized a machine and found a stock install running from memory.

What you give up is jurisdiction, and it is not a small thing. Windscribe Limited is registered in Ontario under Ontario law, which puts it inside the five-country intelligence agreement that most people buying a VPN are trying to get away from. The last outside review of its server software was in June 2024, so it now sits just outside what this site counts as recently checked.

Mullvad has spent fifteen years removing things. There is no account in the usual sense: you are issued a random number, you add time to it, and nobody asks who you are. You can pay in cash by post. The price is five euros a month at one month and at ten years, so the pricing page has nothing to compare and no reason to hurry you. Its value is in that flatness rather than in the length of the feature list.

The strongest thing anyone can say about a no-logs promise is that it was tested, and Mullvad's was. In 2023 Swedish police arrived with a warrant, searched the company's servers and left empty-handed, because there was nothing on them to take. The servers run from memory rather than disk, and every app is open source, so the claim is checkable rather than merely stated.

The cost is that the product is deliberately small, and you will meet the edges quickly. Five devices is the limit and it cannot be raised. There is no port forwarding, split tunnelling only pushes apps out of the tunnel rather than pulling them in, and streaming is not supported. Sweden also shares intelligence with thirteen other governments, which is the one thing about its privacy that Mullvad cannot answer by design.

Proton VPN is the rare free tier that is not a lead magnet. There is no data cap and no expiry: the company says it will be free forever, and the paid plan exists to add servers and speed rather than to unlock the basic function. That alone makes it the answer for anyone who wants protection on a laptop without a subscription decision attached.

The paid product is unusually well evidenced. Every year for five years an outside firm has gone into the server infrastructure and checked that the no-logs promise matches what the machines actually do, and every report has been published rather than summarised. Switzerland sits outside the intelligence-sharing arrangements. The apps are open source, port forwarding works, and there are proper television apps rather than a phone app stretched sideways.

The thing to weigh is responsiveness. Of everything measured on the same bench, Proton adds the most delay before a page starts loading — bulk downloads finish quickly, but video calls and ordinary browsing feel a step behind in a way you notice within a minute. Signing up also needs an email address, which is a smaller thing but worth knowing if anonymity is the point.

Private Internet Access does the thing almost nobody else does: it publishes the source code for every app it ships, on every platform. You do not have to believe the no-logs claim on the strength of a marketing page, because you can read what the software actually does — and an outside firm has separately inspected the servers and their configuration to check that the infrastructure matches.

It is also generous in the ways that cost money. There is no limit on simultaneous devices. Port forwarding works, which matters if you torrent. There is a proxy included alongside the tunnel, apps for televisions, and a three-year plan that renews at exactly what you paid rather than stepping up.

The thing to weigh is where it lives. This is a Colorado company operating under US law, inside the five-country intelligence agreement, and no amount of open source changes which courts can issue an order. The company's answer is that it has been asked and had nothing to give, which it publishes. The kill switch is also the weak point: under testing it allowed traffic past the tunnel after a restart, which is worse than not having one.

IVPN is built on the position that most people asking for a VPN do not need one, and says so on its own site rather than in an interview. Registration issues a random account identifier: no email address, no password, nothing tying the account to a person unless you volunteer it. Cash by post is accepted on any term of a year or longer.

The engineering follows the argument. Every client is open source under GPLv3, multi-hop routing through two countries is included on the cheapest plan rather than sold as a tier, and the desktop apps run a system firewall that blocks everything outside the tunnel and can be left on across a reboot. AntiTracker filters ads and trackers at DNS level, and connections can be disguised with V2Ray on every platform.

The cost is that the audit record is thinner than the annual cadence suggests. Cure53 has examined the service every year, but the 2025 engagement covered the mail and DNS side products; the gateways you connect through were last audited in February 2023, and the no-logs claim itself only ever in March 2019 — a format the company says it will not repeat. Five devices is the ceiling on Standard, and no plan offers port forwarding.

This is a browser maker's subscription business, and what it is becomes clear once you know where to look. The servers are not its own. A Swedish operator states on its own help pages that this organisation has used its global network of VPN servers since July 2019, and that a portion of that network is what the subscription offers — five hundred machines across thirty-odd countries.

The arrangement is the whole proposition, and it cuts both ways. That network was built by a company with an unusually strong published record on privacy, and Mozilla's own privacy notice states that traffic is encrypted and sent to that operator, with no logs of network activity kept by either party. What you add on top is a brand many people already trust for reasons unrelated to VPNs.

The cost is that the company you actually contract with is American, which puts it inside the five-country arrangement, and it has published no outside examination of how it handles subscriber data. An operator's record belongs to that operator and does not transfer to whoever resells its servers. At $59.88 a year for five devices the price sits in the ordinary middle, and buying from the operator directly is a real alternative worth pricing first.

A no-logs promise asks the same thing of a reader every time: trust that a company able to see both who you are and what you did chooses not to write it down. This service is built to remove the question. Traffic is relayed through this company's servers to exit servers run by a separate company, so the business taking your payment cannot decrypt what you are doing, and the business that can decrypt it never learns who you are.

The rest follows from that decision. The client's source is published rather than described, the connection is obfuscated to survive networks that block VPN traffic, and the two-hop path is the product rather than a premium feature. If your objection to VPNs is that they move trust rather than remove it, this answers it directly.

The costs are real. There is a macOS client and an iOS application, and nothing for Windows, Linux or Android. Nobody outside the company has examined the design or the code — published source is an invitation to check, not a report that somebody did. The company is American, so it sits inside the five-country arrangement. And $8 a month with no annual rate works out above the going yearly price.

AirVPN is what a VPN looks like when it is run by engineers with no marketing department. Every piece of software is open source. The plans go from three days to three years with no tier system, because every plan includes everything. You can open an account without giving an email address and pay in cryptocurrency with no processor in between. The service has been operating on these terms since 2010.

Its transparency is unusual in kind rather than degree. There is a public monitor showing the load and bandwidth of every server, updated continuously, so the claims about capacity are checkable by anyone at any time rather than being taken on trust. Port forwarding is included, obfuscation works on every server, and the Tor integration is built into the client.

It is not the easy option, and the gaps are real. There is no iPhone or iPad app at all, which rules it out for a lot of people immediately. Nobody outside the company has ever audited anything, so the no-logs claim rests entirely on the source code and your willingness to read it. Italy is inside the fourteen-country intelligence agreement, and Italian residents are barred from using the service altogether.