Bitdefender VPN

Most of the large antivirus companies are American or British. This one is Romanian, and it says so deliberately: its own page argues that its jurisdiction sits outside the five, nine and fourteen-country intelligence arrangements. For a reader choosing on where the courts are, that is a real distinction from the other suite VPNs here, and it is the main reason to consider it.

What it is not is a network of its own. The service runs on the Hydra protocol, which the company licenses rather than wrote, and the servers behind it belong to a separate company that sells the same infrastructure under its own brand. Two products, one network. Neither vendor's site makes that easy to discover, which is precisely why it is stated here.

The trade-off is that nothing outside the company has ever tested the no-logs promise, so a strong jurisdiction is being asked to carry weight that an audit would normally carry. The price doubles at renewal, from $34.99 for the first year to $69.99, and the ad blocker is the only extra of substance. It is a reasonable second line of defence for somebody already inside this company's ecosystem, and a thin argument for anybody who is not.