Proton VPN’s Free Tier Is the Best You’ll Find
Free VPNs are hard to trust. And if you’re going to use it regularly, it’s best to pay for a reliable and secure VPN to get consistent speeds and eliminate the threat of data leaks. But there may be times when you need to use a VPN for a simple task – for example, to open a page from another country or hide your location.
In such cases, and perhaps even as a default option, you can use Proton VPN’s free tier .
Not all of Proton’s services are free: they make money by selling secure VPN, data syncing, email and password management services. PCMag gives Proton VPN a 5-star rating and Proton Mail is a PCMag Editor’s Choice .
How Proton VPN’s free tier works
There is no catch here, just some restrictions. First of all, it’s truly borderless, and in our testing we found it to be quite fast for general browsing, although it’s not designed for 4K video streaming. Even on the free tier, there are no ads and no logging or tracking.
However, there are two big limitations. The free account is limited to one device (though you can create another account for use with a different device to get around this). And secondly, the free tier only allows you to connect to three regions. In the US, this randomly links you to another state; in Europe you connect to the Netherlands, and in Asia you connect to servers in Japan.
The thing is, you can’t choose the location of the servers (like you can with the free version of Opera VPN). You have to reconnect every time, switching randomly, and Proton VPN sets the timeout between reconnections to a minute and a half.
But that’s all. If you can handle this part, you can use Proton VPN as the default free VPN on your computer or smartphone using two different accounts. The application is fast, secure and easy to use. You can connect and disconnect with one click, without accidentally losing the connection.
If you want more, you can sign up for Proton VPN’s paid plan, which costs $4.99 per month for a two-year subscription (billed $119.76 every two years). You can also check out other VPN options at PCMag .