FastestVPN

The device coverage is genuinely broad for the money. Applications are published for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android, plus Fire TV and browser extensions, with ten simultaneous logins and unlimited bandwidth. A month costs $5, two years costs $19.95, and a lifetime plan costs $40 paid once.

That lifetime plan is the thing to think hardest about. It converts a subscription into a single payment, which sounds like a saving and is really a transfer of risk: you are betting $40 that the company keeps operating, keeps the servers running and keeps honouring a plan it no longer earns revenue from. Providers that sell lifetime access have a structural reason to under-invest in the customers who bought it.

The catch is that there is no company to assess. No legal entity, registered address or country appears on the home page, and the terms and about pages return navigation links and nothing else. Nothing outside the business has examined the no-logs claim either. And despite the name, speed is its weakest point: on fast broadband, independent testing found the tunnel, not your plan, setting the pace. The result is a cheap, capable-looking product asking for a permanent commitment while declining to say who is on the other end of it, and those two facts sit badly together.