VPNs with a kill switch that actually works

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.

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.

CyberGhost runs a very large server network from a Romanian company, and the part that matters most is invisible: the fleet runs from RAM, so nothing is written to disk and everything held is lost the moment a machine reboots. Deloitte examined those no-logging safeguards as they stood on 31 October 2025 and issued a formal assurance report, a stronger artefact than the attestations most of this market publishes.

What you buy is breadth: servers sold for streaming and a Smart DNS for devices that cannot run an app, a content blocker that refuses ad and tracker domains at the server rather than in the app, first-party apps down to Fire TV, and forty-five days to change your mind rather than the usual thirty.

The catch is the pricing structure and a piece of ownership the site never mentions. The advertised rate buys twenty-six months in one charge; the renewal buys twelve for the same money, so the monthly figure roughly doubles two years after you decided anything. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Kape Technologies, which has traded under that name only since 2018 and owns two other services in this market — a fact that appears nowhere on its site. There is no port forwarding and no multi-hop.

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. The device allowance on the monthly plan is low enough that you will have to choose which machines to protect, and it rises only if you commit for longer. 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.

NordVPN has done the evidence work more thoroughly than anyone. Six times now an outside firm has gone into the infrastructure under a formal assurance standard, interviewed staff, inspected the servers and checked the configuration against what the privacy policy claims — most recently Deloitte, at the end of 2025. Panama sits outside the intelligence-sharing agreements. The servers hold nothing on disk.

The product around that is broad. It will route you through two servers, reach the Tor network without a separate browser, and disguise the fact that you are using a VPN at all on networks built to block them. There are proper apps for televisions and a browser extension that works without the desktop app running.

The catch is what you actually pay. The rate on the advertising covers twenty-seven months in a single charge, and what it renews at is more than three times that number — a subscription whose real cost arrives two years after you decided, when comparing it against anything else has become inconvenient. The audit report is also not published: you can read it only after logging in to an account you have already paid for.

ExpressVPN is the one that gets out of the way. You install it, press the button, and it connects quickly to something sensible without asking you to pick a protocol or a server. On networks that interfere with VPN traffic it works around them automatically rather than making you find the obfuscation setting. If a VPN is infrastructure you would rather not think about, this is the one that asks least of your attention.

Behind that, the servers hold nothing on disk and rebuild themselves from a known state on every restart, which is a genuinely good architecture and has been reviewed by an outside firm. There are apps for everything, including televisions, and a browser extension that works on its own.

The cost is money and it is substantial. The introductory rate covers a little over two years, after which it renews annually at roughly three times what you were quoted. The evidence is also thinner than the marketing implies: the most recent review checked the controls as they stood on a single day rather than over a period, the apps have not been examined since 2024, and the code for them is closed. Router firmware, long a selling point, has been discontinued.

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.

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. 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.

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.

This is the ad blocker company's second product, and it is built to be undemanding. There is one transport, written in-house, so there is no protocol menu to understand and nothing to configure before you are protected. Ten devices, applications on six platforms and a router, a working kill switch, no leaks in testing, and cryptocurrency accepted at the till.

That simplicity extends to finding out whether you want it. The free tier gives you a few gigabytes a month on two devices, which is enough to test the thing properly rather than to sample it for a week, and the paid plan carries a month-long refund window on any term of a year or more.

The cost is throughput. Independent testing measured it at a small fraction of the unprotected line, slow enough that on a modern connection the tunnel, rather than your broadband, decides how fast everything goes. If your connection is already slower than that, you will not notice. The single in-house protocol cuts the other way too: nobody outside the company has ever examined the thing carrying your traffic, and no assessment of the service has been published.

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.

The most useful thing about this service is how little it asks you to commit. The free plan carries a monthly data allowance rather than a countdown to a card prompt, so you can find out whether it suits you without paying, and the paid plan puts no ceiling on simultaneous devices — an unusual pairing, and the reason its subscription costs so little per month on a long term. Its own privacy policy goes as far as recommending cryptocurrency to keep payment data to a minimum.

The mechanism behind the marketing is worth reading closely. The service is sold on Swiss privacy law, and the controller named in its privacy policy is a company organised under the laws of Iceland. The Swiss entity, and an American one, appear in that same document as payment processors acting on the Icelandic company's instructions.

The cost is what you cannot check. Nobody outside the company has examined the no-logs claim, so the specific commitments in the policy stand on the company's word. Speed falls off substantially at distance, losing most of a fast connection on the furthest servers tested. And a product sold on privacy uses mobile advertising identifiers to attribute its own marketing, which is common and still worth knowing.

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.

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.

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.

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 first-year price that is not really the price is the norm in this market. This one is not that. A year for one device is $49.99, three devices $64.99, five devices $69.99, and the subscription renews automatically at the same figure — stated on the same page, next to the buy button, rather than in a footnote. For a reader who has been caught by a renewal once, that alone is worth something.

The jurisdiction is the other argument. The company is Finnish, says so plainly, and Finland sits outside the five, nine and fourteen-country intelligence arrangements while still being inside the European data-protection regime. The applications carry the things a general reader needs and not much more: a kill switch on desktop and Android, an ad blocker on desktop and iOS.

The catch is the pricing model that makes the honesty possible. Charging per device means the entry price buys one device, at roughly what competitors charge for five or ten, and a household quickly finds itself on the more expensive tier. Nothing outside the company has examined the no-logs claim either, so the same gap as the other suite vendors applies. You are paying a premium for predictability and a jurisdiction, not for capability.

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.

The pricing is the product. A month costs $12.95, which is at the upper end of ordinary; commit two years and three extra months and it falls to $2.14 a month billed $53.75; commit five years and it falls to $1.69 a month billed $101.55. Every discount is a function of how far ahead you are willing to pay, and the applications cover desktop and mobile in the usual way.

Two things about that ladder deserve reading closely. The billed figures are described as covering "the first" two or five years, and no renewal rate is published beside them, so what happens at the end of a five-year term is unstated. And a five-year prepayment is an unusually long bet on a consumer VPN brand remaining in business and remaining the same product.

The cost is that the thing you research and the thing you buy have come apart. Ivacy merged into a larger provider in 2024 and its clients were carried across with subscriptions honoured, which is the gentle version of that outcome. But Ivacy's own pages still name no legal entity or country, while the service behind them belongs to a company that publishes both — named in the jurisdiction note here. Paying five years ahead now buys a brand rather than an operator.