Mullvad

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.