Private Internet Access Alternatives

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.

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.

Most no-logs promises are checked, if at all, by a firm the company hired. This one was checked by an opponent. A two-month information injunction sought customer data, the company fought it, and it won on the ground that the data being demanded did not exist to hand over. That is a stronger class of evidence than any audit, because the party asking the question wanted a different answer.

The mechanism behind it is deliberate and physical. The company builds and owns its servers rather than renting capacity, and runs them without disks, so there is no persistent storage for connection records to accumulate in. It carries insurance to cover the legal costs of defending that position, which is an unusual thing to buy and a revealing one.

The cost is threefold. There has never been an independent audit, so everything except the court case rests on the company's word. On value, the monthly plan costs $12 for four devices, few enough that you must choose which machines to protect, and both improve only on a longer commitment. And since 2023 the company has been owned by an American group that also sells several other VPN brands — announced openly at the time, and not mentioned anywhere a new visitor would see it.

hide.me is run by a Malaysian company, and the free plan is the part worth knowing first: no account, no email address, no card, no data cap and no expiry. You download it and you are protected. Paying keeps that ease of use: checkout asks only for an email. That is a different proposition from a free tier with a countdown attached, and the company treats it as a product rather than a funnel.

The paid plan is unusually complete for the price. Ten devices, first-party apps across nine platform families including Apple TV and Fire TV, split tunnelling in both directions, and a multi-hop mode where you pick both the entry and the exit server rather than choosing from fixed pairs. IPv6 is carried inside the tunnel on every location rather than blocked, which is the harder of the two ways to solve that problem.

The downside is what the audit covers and how much sits behind the paid tier. Securitum examined the no-logging claim properly — interviews, configuration, a server image — but dated its report 7 June 2024, past the two-year line this directory draws. Whether the servers run without disks cannot be settled from published sources. And the ad blocker, the proxy, the streaming servers and port forwarding are all for paying subscribers only.

The commitment here is written unusually specifically. Rather than promising no logs and leaving the term undefined, the policy enumerates what is not recorded: browsing history, traffic destination, connection timestamps, DNS queries, the IP address you were allocated and the one you connected from, content and bandwidth. Naming the allocated and the connecting address separately is the detail that stands out, because those are the two records that identify a session after the fact.

Specificity of that kind is worth something on its own. A general promise can be quietly reinterpreted; a list this particular would have to be contradicted outright, and the company that wrote it is small enough that it is the same people answering for it.

The cost is that nobody has ever checked. No outside firm has examined the claim, so the wording is the whole of the evidence. Independent testing also measured the tunnel taking roughly two thirds of the connection in every region tried, which is consistent but heavy, and Sweden shares intelligence with thirteen other governments — a fact about the jurisdiction that no amount of careful drafting can answer.

PureVPN sells a very cheap long term from a British Virgin Islands company, with the group itself run from Karachi. What the subscription covers is broad: ten devices, first-party apps across nine platform families down to Apple TV and Fire TV, servers picked out for individual streaming services, and an ad and tracker blocker on every tier.

The reason to read the entry is a 2017 federal case. An FBI affidavit records that the company supplied records tying one customer account to two originating IP addresses — a home connection and an employer's — precisely the category a no-logs policy is understood to exclude. Its answer at the time was that it had not broken its policy because it kept no browsing history, which was a defence about a question nobody had asked.

The tradeoff is that the reassurance has aged and the price has a second half. The last independent assessment ran in February 2023; the company describes an always-on arrangement letting an auditor arrive unannounced, but a standing permission is not an assessment that happened, and its own pages no longer name the firm that did the last one. The long plan charges once for twenty-seven months and then renews yearly, and port forwarding and a dedicated address are extra, so the value is concentrated in the first term.

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.

A VPN normally takes the connection you have and sends it somewhere else. This one takes every connection you have and uses them at once. Broadband and mobile data together, or two mobile networks, bonded into a single session that survives either link failing. That is why it sells to live broadcasters and to people working from moving vehicles, rather than to people worried about their government.

That changes what the product is for. A dropped Wi-Fi connection mid-call does not end the call, because the mobile link was already carrying part of it. A weak connection is supplemented rather than merely encrypted. The applications cover the five platforms a general reader needs, and the monthly price sits at the ordinary market rate with the usual discounts for committing longer.

The tradeoff is that the privacy story is the weakest thing about it. The company is American and therefore inside the five-country arrangement, the no-logs claim has never been examined by anyone outside, and nothing about the architecture reduces what the operator could see if it chose to. Bought as insurance against a bad connection it is genuinely without competition here; bought as protection from surveillance it is an ordinary American VPN with an unusual feature.