Astrill

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. On value alone it is hard to justify.

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, 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.