Free VPNs: who is paying for them

• Free vpns run on real servers with real bandwidth bills, so the money comes from somewhere else.
• Model one: advertising inside the app, which means a tracking library inside the thing you installed for privacy.
• Model two: a data cap, typically a few gigabytes a month, after which the speed drops to something unusable.
• Model three: a free tier as a shop window, with two crowded locations and a nag screen to upgrade.
• Model four, the bad one: your connection is resold as an exit point for other people's traffic.
• Model five is the one here: 5 days free with no card, and after that the key stops unless you pay.

Ask what the service would need to break even. A single decent server costs real money a month, and a free app with a few hundred thousand users needs a lot of them. Nobody absorbs that out of goodwill for long. So when people ask are vpns free, the accurate answer is that some cost no money and all of them cost something.

The tolerable versions are honest about it. A data cap is visible, a shop window tier is visible, an upgrade prompt is annoying but transparent. The version to avoid is the one where the cost is invisible: an app that reads more than it needs, sells an audience profile, or quietly routes strangers through your line. If the privacy policy is vague about what is collected and who it is shared with, that vagueness is the product.

• 5 days free, no card, no account, nothing to cancel afterwards.
• 1 month: $4.90.
• 6 months: $3.90 a month, charged once as $23.40.
• 12 months: $3.20 a month, charged once as $38.40.
• 24 months: $2.90 a month, charged once as $69.60.
• No cut down tier: every term has 5 devices and all six locations, US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Netherlands, France.
• Cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and crypto in the bot. When a term ends the key stops, nothing renews.

For an occasional need, free is fine. A single evening on hotel Wi-Fi, one page that will not open on a cafe network, one login you do not want broadcast in an airport lounge: a capped free tier covers that without anybody losing. The problems begin when it becomes the everyday connection for a household, because that is exactly the point at which the cap, the ads and the crowded servers stop being a minor annoyance.

That is the reason the trial here has a hard edge. Five days is long enough to test every device you own, a weekday evening and a weekend, and short enough that nobody mistakes it for a permanent free plan. When it ends, the key stops. No card was taken, so there is nothing to cancel and nothing to notice on a statement later.

• There is no permanent free plan here, and we would rather say so than bury it in a footnote.
• The free days are the full product: no reduced speed, no missing locations, no queue.
• One trial per person. The point is to test it, not to run on trials forever.
• Not for gambling or piracy, on the free days as much as on a paid term.