Should you use a free VPN?

A free VPN is not free of cost: somebody pays for the servers, and what they get in return decides what you give up. This page explains what free plans usually limit, how free services pay their bills, what to check before you trust one, and why our tables do not cover them.

What free plans usually limit

Running a VPN costs money: servers, bandwidth and support. A free plan pays for only part of that, so it is usually held back in one or more ways. Which ways differs from one service to the next, so read a plan's own page before you rely on it.

Data. A monthly or daily cap, after which the VPN stops or slows down.
Servers and locations. A short list of places to connect from, sometimes chosen for you, and often shared with a lot of other people.
Speed. Free users can be put on busier servers, or have their speed held down so that paying customers come first.
Devices. Often one device, or fewer than a paid plan allows.
Features. Some plans leave out things a paid plan has, such as choosing the server, certain ways of connecting, or help from support. The plan's own page lists them.

None of this makes a free plan a poor choice for a short or light job. It means the limits should suit what you want to do with it.

How a free service pays its bills

The servers cost money whether or not you pay, so it is worth asking where the money comes from. There are three common answers, and they are not equally harmless:

Your upgrade. The free plan is a sample of a paid one, and the company earns from the people who move up. Here the limits above are the price of the free plan.
Advertising. The service shows you ads, in its app or elsewhere. Ads can come with trackers, so check what the app asks to do and what the service's policy says about it.
Your data. Some services record what you do online and sell it or share it with others. A VPN sits between you and everything you connect to, so it is in a position to see a lot, and a service that uses that to earn money defeats the reason you installed it.

A service can combine these. Which of them a particular service does is something to find out, not something to assume either way. This page does not say which services do which.

What to check before you trust one

Each of these takes a few minutes. All of them sit in places the service controls, so read them as claims, not as proof.

The privacy policy. Look for plain words on what the service records (the sites you visit, your address, when you connected), how long it keeps that and who it shares it with. A policy that is vague, very short or hard to find tells you something. A line saying only that it does not log is a claim; a policy that says what it does keep is more useful.
The owner. Who runs the service, and where is the company based? A company you can name, with an address and a way to reach it, is easier to hold to its word than one you cannot find. The laws of its country decide what it can be made to hand over.
The app and its permissions. Look at what the app asks to reach on your device, and at its store listing: who published it, what it says it does, and how recently it was updated. An app that asks for access a VPN has no use for is a reason to stop.
How it makes money. If you cannot find out how the service pays for itself, count that against it.
Whether the limits suit you. The cap, the locations, the speed and the device count from the section above, against what you want to do.

Once a VPN is running you can see for yourself whether it changes your address and country, with the VPN IP test, and whether anything leaks around it, with the leak test. Those checks show what your connection looks like from outside. They cannot show what a service does with your traffic once it has it.

What we test, and what we do not

We test paid plans. We buy each subscription ourselves, anonymously and at retail, and never accept an account from a provider. We do not test free plans, so nothing in our tables says whether a free plan is fast, reliable or trustworthy, and this page makes no claim about any named service.

Each node has its own table of paid plans, measured the same way:

Asia Residential, home line: its table
Asia Data Center, data center line: its table
South Africa Residential, home line: its table

What our data shows

Every node's table is on the results page, with what each column means. They cover paid plans only. A free plan's limits, owner and privacy policy are not something our tables can show.