VPNs based in Five Eyes countries

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.

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.

TunnelBear treats being understood as the product. The app is two switches and a map; the kill switch is called VigilantBear and the obfuscation GhostBear, and the effect is that somebody who has never thought about protocols never has to. No plan caps devices, including the free one, so nothing has to be planned around.

Behind the cartoon is an unusually long review record. Cure53 has assessed the service repeatedly since 2017 — its 2023 report calls itself the eleventh such review — and these are white-box tests covering the apps, the backend, the server configurations and the public interfaces rather than a questionnaire. The annual audit that competitors now advertise is a practice this company started.

The catch is that the record is thinner at the recent end than the cadence suggests, and the product is narrow. No report was ever published for the 2024 audit; it exists only as a company summary posted fourteen months late, and the ninth is described as finished and has never been written up. An independent lab found the kill switch leaks after a reboot and after a crash. There is no Linux app, nothing for a television, no port forwarding, no multi-hop and no attempt at streaming — the support pages say so directly.

IPVanish sells one subscription with no limit on simultaneous connections, and means it: an independent lab ran eleven at once without hitting a ceiling. The apps are first-party on seven platform families including Apple TV, Android TV and Fire TV, which is broader television coverage than most of the market manages. Threat Protection filters ads and trackers at DNS level on every plan.

What makes the entry worth reading is older than that. In 2016, under previous ownership, the company answered a Homeland Security administrative summons with a subscriber's name, email address, home IP address and the times they connected and disconnected — after first replying that it kept no usage information, then suggesting the agency come back with a more detailed demand. It has changed hands twice since, and Schellman Compliance examined the no-logs claim in February 2025.

The thing to weigh is whether that audit answers the history. The fleet is still, by the company's own account, a mixture of disk-based and RAM-only machines and will not be fully diskless until 2027, so there is more to examine than at services built to retain nothing. A lab found the kill switch leaks after a reboot, a crash and a dropped connection. And the first year costs $46.68 while the second costs $99.99.

A suite vendor's VPN is usually a feature rather than a product, and this one is worth separating from that assumption. It is sold as its own subscription with its own applications, and it runs on roughly 140 locations of physical servers the company operates rather than licences from somebody else — which is not true of every security company's VPN.

The evidence behind its privacy claim is unusually specific. An outside firm ran a technical privacy impact assessment across June and July 2025, revisited additional server instances at the end of July, retested in August, and published in September with every finding recorded as remediated and an overall privacy impact score of None. That is more recent and more precisely scoped than what several better-regarded services can show.

The cost is that the same product fails a basic test. Independent testing found the kill switch allowing a reconnection outside the tunnel after a reboot or a dropped connection, which is exactly the moment a kill switch exists for. The privacy policy also reserves the collection of device and application telemetry alongside the no-traffic-logs promise, there is no Linux client or router support, and no way to sign up or pay without identifying yourself. The price needs reading twice too: what you pay for the first year is half what it costs to keep.

A security company that wanted a real VPN bought one. In November 2024 it acquired AzireVPN, a small Swedish operator, and its own audit post states that the resulting infrastructure now powers both products, which it operates and maintains itself. That is a change of position, not just a purchase: before it, this brand ran on a network it rented. Transparency reports are published annually and a warrant canary monthly.

Then it did the rarer thing. It commissioned an outside firm to examine the infrastructure, the firm found two problems it rated critical — both concerning how servers are provisioned and booted rather than how traffic is handled — and the company published the report anyway, severity ratings intact, with an explanation of why exploiting either would require physical access to its datacentres. The same examination found no evidence of user activity being logged.

The cost is what that report has not yet said. There is no published confirmation that either critical finding has been fixed, so what a reader has is a company being unusually honest about problems that were open when it wrote. The company is American, so an American court is what compels it, there is no Linux client or router support, and signing up requires an identity like everywhere else.

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.

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.

TorGuard was built for people who move a lot of data, and the subscription reflects that in a way little else does: port forwarding and a SOCKS5 proxy are both included rather than sold as extras, and the obfuscation options run deeper than the category norm, with Shadowsocks and Stunnel in the client and a separate proxy app adding several more.

Then a group of thirty-six film production companies sued, and on 3 March 2022 the parties filed a stipulation in the Southern District of Florida in which the company agreed to use commercially reasonable efforts to block BitTorrent traffic on its servers in the United States. That obligation appears nowhere on its own website, which still advertises every American server as optimised for peer-to-peer transfer with port forwarding support.

What you give up is most of the reassurance the rest of this market offers. Nobody outside the company has ever examined the servers or the logging claim, and the company cites no audit — so the no-logs promise rests on the promise. The base subscription buys neither streaming access nor a dedicated address; both are monthly add-ons on top of it. The refund window is seven days rather than thirty, and cryptocurrency payments are excluded from it entirely.

This service is built to move bulk data, and it does that better than the category generally manages. A large download finishes in a fraction of the time most protected connections take, on a network reaching more than eighty countries, with obfuscation and a route through Tor included rather than sold on top. If what you want is to shift a lot of traffic through a tunnel, the engineering is pointed directly at it.

The reason it is worth understanding is who else sells it. Its owner supplies the same underlying network to security companies that market their own VPNs as independent choices, each with its own applications and its own privacy policy stacked in front of the identical servers. Somebody comparing those products on privacy is comparing the policies, not the tunnels carrying their traffic.

The cost is everything that is not bulk transfer. The delay before a response begins is among the worst measured anywhere, so calls stutter and ordinary pages feel heavier than they did unprotected. Testing found the kill switch letting unencrypted traffic past during a crash, no outside assessment of the service could be located, and signing up requires both an email address and a payment method that identifies you.

The design decision is to stay out of the way of the connection you already have. Independent testing across four regions found the tunnel costing almost nothing in download speed, and upload speeds measuring higher with it on than without — a result very few services in this category produce. If your objection to using a VPN is that everything gets slower, this one largely answers it.

What it will not tell you is whether the promise underneath holds. The logging policy has never been examined by anyone outside the company, the network is small by the standards of the market, and the reviewers who measured the speed also record that some logs are kept.

The catch is the record. In 2024 the American regulator required the corporate group to pay sixteen and a half million dollars and barred it from selling browsing data for advertising, over collecting such data through antivirus software and browser extensions marketed as protection against tracking, then selling it on through a subsidiary to more than a hundred buyers. The conduct did not involve this VPN. The resulting order covers products under this brand anyway, which is the part worth knowing when deciding who should carry all of your traffic.

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.

Longevity is worth something in a market where brands appear and vanish, and this is one of the older consumer VPNs still on sale. It is run from New York by a company that also sells a handful of other productivity and security tools, and it has kept a wide platform spread — desktop, mobile, Linux and browser extensions — along with its own protocol built for networks that block ordinary VPN traffic.

The pricing is where it differs from its neighbours. A month costs about what everyone charges, a year is priced sensibly, and three years costs a hundred dollars in total, which works out below almost anything else here on a per-month basis. Split tunnelling is included, so the applications that need the tunnel get it and the ones that break inside it do not.

What you give up is the same thing several entries in this directory ask you to give up, and it is not small. The company is American, so it sits inside the five-country arrangement, and nothing outside the company has ever examined the no-logs promise. The lowest rate also requires paying three years in advance, which is a bet on the company still trading at the end of the term.

Anyone comparing this against its better-known sibling should know they are one business. The privacy policy gives a single New York address for the operating company and for the media group that owns it, and that group also sells a second VPN brand as an entirely separate product, with its own pricing and its own applications. Two storefronts, one owner, one set of corporate policies behind both.

What this brand brings is age. It has been sold continuously for far longer than most of this market has existed, the applications cover the four platforms most people need, and a monthly rate of $11.99 sits where the market sits. For a reader who would rather deal with a large American company than a small offshore one, that is a coherent choice.

The catch is what the pricing page leaves out. The annual rate of $47.69 is described as applying to the first year, and no renewal figure appears beside it anywhere — an undisclosed increase is harder to plan for than a disclosed one. Nothing outside the company has examined the no-logs promise either, and the American jurisdiction sits inside the five-country arrangement. You are buying longevity and corporate scale rather than verification.