VPNs with unlimited devices

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.

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.

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.

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.

Surfshark is built for a household rather than a person. One subscription covers unlimited devices, which is the difference between protecting your own laptop and protecting everyone's phones, televisions and tablets without counting. The apps are good, there are proper television builds, and it will route you through two servers or block ads before they load.

The evidence behind it is stronger than its reputation suggests. The whole fleet runs from memory with nothing written to disk, Deloitte produced a reasonable-assurance report on the no-logs claim in 2025 after assessing the servers themselves, and a separate firm penetration-tested the network infrastructure later that year.

The cost is at renewal, and it is what holds the value score down. The rate on the advertisement covers twenty-seven months in one charge, after which it renews annually at roughly double the effective monthly figure. The Netherlands is also inside the fourteen-country intelligence agreement, which is easy to miss when a service is described as a privacy-friendly European option. The apps are closed source, and IPv6 is not supported at all — the guidance is to switch it off on your network.

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.

The design decision here is to sell access and charge for it. This is a service bought by people who need a connection to work from a network that actively blocks such connections, and its reputation rests on continuing to work where that is difficult. Independent testing bears out the performance half of the claim: measured across four regions, the tunnel cost almost nothing in throughput, and in one region the protected connection tested faster than the unprotected one.

The mechanism is a proprietary stack, a large engineering effort aimed at obfuscation, and a price that funds it. The subscription costs several times the market's usual monthly rate, with no discount for committing to a longer term, and extra simultaneous devices and higher-capacity servers are charged on top of that again.

The catch is what the privacy policy says. The company retains the last twenty connection records for each account, including the time and duration of each session, the country, and the device type, tied to the registered email address. It describes this as a support tool, which it may well be, and it is still a record of when you connected and for how long. No outside firm has examined any of it, and the interface has been described by testers as dated and awkward.