Free vs paid VPN: what you give up

Short answer: a free VPN from a company with a paid business behind it can be fine for light use. A free VPN with no visible way of making money is the one to avoid, because you are probably how it makes money.

How free VPNs pay their bills

Running VPN servers costs money, so every free VPN is paid for somehow. The EFF lists the usual ways: some free VPNs sell your data, some use a “freemium” model that caps your data until you pay, and some are funded in ways you can only find by reading the privacy policy. Its advice is to ask how the service makes money before trusting it with your traffic.

What researchers found inside VPN apps

A study by researchers at CSIRO, ICSI, UC Berkeley and the University of New South Wales examined 283 Android apps from Google Play that use Android's VPN permission. ICSI reported that 18% of them didn't encrypt traffic at all, and the paper also looked at embedded third-party tracking libraries and apps injecting JavaScript. The study is from 2016 and 2017, so the specific apps have changed, but the lesson holds: an app calling itself a VPN tells you nothing about whether it protects you.

Free plans from established providers

• Proton VPN has a free plan on one device with no data limit and no ads. Free users get a limited choice of server countries. Proton VPN facts.
• EventVPN, a free, ad-supported app from ExpressVPN's team, is available on Apple devices. A Cure53 security test published in 2026 found one critical and two high-severity issues, one of which let IPv6 traffic bypass the VPN on some networks. Cure53's report says all of them were fixed and that it verified the fixes.

Apart from Proton VPN, none of the six providers we compare has a free plan of its own. Instead they offer a trial or a money-back window, which lets you try the full service:

Refund terms have conditions. Several providers don't refund cash, crypto or gift-card payments, and purchases through Apple's or Google's app stores usually follow the store's refund rules. Each provider page lists the exact conditions.

When free is enough

• You want a VPN occasionally, for example on a network you don't trust.
• The free plan comes from a provider whose paid business you can see and check.
• You don't need to pick a specific country or use many devices.

When to pay

• You want the VPN on all the time, or on several devices.
• You need servers in a particular country.
• You can't tell how a free VPN makes money. Then paying a provider with a published audit is the safer choice. See how to check a no-logs claim.