Free VPN or paid VPN?What the difference actually costs you

Most comparisons of free and paid VPNs argue from motive: the free one must be selling something, so avoid it. That is probably true and it is not measurable, so we will start with what is.

We measured two paid services by hand across 14 cities and 46 paired runs. Between 40% and 90% of the raw line survived the tunnel. In Tokyo, a 780 Mbps line came out at 444.9 Mbps on one service and 399.9 Mbps on the other — roughly half, on services people pay for.

• Paid services lost 10% to 60% of the line in our own tests
• Free tiers add a monthly data cap on top of that
• The seven paid providers we track publish 7 to 45 days of money-back cover
• Five of the seven name the outside firm that examined their no-logs claim
• Free services rarely name any of the above

Start with the number, not the motive

If a paid service in a good location gives you back half your line, a free service with fewer servers and more people on each of them is not going to do better. This is not a moral argument about business models — it is the same physics with worse inputs.

It also sets a useful expectation in the other direction. If your paid VPN is giving you 50% in Tokyo, that is normal rather than broken. In London we measured about 90% on the same two services. The route matters more than the brand.

What you can check about a paid provider, and cannot about a free one

Three things are verifiable rather than promised, and the seven providers we track publish all three.

Jurisdiction. Five state the country they operate under: Panama, the Netherlands, Sweden, the United States and Canada. That decides how a legal demand is handled.

An audit with a name attached. Five name the firm — Deloitte for three of them, Packetlabs and Leviathan for another, and six separate organisations for Mullvad. "Independently audited" without a name is not the same claim.

A way out. Money-back windows run from 7 days (Windscribe) to 45 (CyberGhost — on the six-month and two-year plans only; the monthly plan gets 14). A free service has no window because there is nothing to refund, which sounds like an advantage until something goes wrong.

Where free genuinely makes sense

We are not going to pretend it never does. A capped free tier from a provider that also sells a paid product — Windscribe is the obvious example in our set — is a reasonable way to encrypt a café connection for an hour, or to check whether a service is reachable from another country before you commit money.

What it does not do is stream. Video needs sustained throughput and a data cap measured in gigabytes per month disappears in an evening. If your reason for wanting a VPN is a streaming service, the free tier is not a cheaper version of the answer; it is a different answer to a different question.

The coverage problem nobody mentions

Free tiers restrict which countries you can select — that is the standard way of pushing people to the paid plan. That restriction is the part that decides whether the service can help you at all.

Every one of the seven paid providers we track publishes a location in Japan, for example. Four of them publish two or more Japanese cities. If the country you need is not on the free tier's list, no amount of patience gets you there, and the free lists are short by design.

How much speed actually survives the tunnel

Every VPN site says a tunnel costs you speed. Almost none of them say how much. We measured it by hand rather than repeating a claim: 14 cities, 46 paired runs, comparing NordVPN and Surfshark against the same raw line in the same session. In the 11 cities where we also measured the bare line, the share that survived the tunnel ranged from 40% to 90%.

Measured by VPN LIFE. Raw-line figures are rounded to the nearest 10 Mbps. Percentages are the share of the raw line that survived.

• 14 cities, 46 paired runs, measured by hand
• 11 of those cities also have the bare line measured
• 40% to 90% of the raw line survived
• We only name a winner in 4 cities — the rest have too few runs

The spread between cities is larger than the spread between providers. In London roughly nine tenths of the line survived on both services; in Tokyo it was closer to half. That is worth knowing before you blame the provider: "this VPN is slow" is usually "this route is slow".

We only call a winner in a city when we have five or more paired runs there and the gap is at least 10%. That threshold is met in 4 of the 14 cities — Tokyo and Los Angeles, where NordVPN averaged ahead, and London and New York, where the two were level. In the remaining ten cities we publish the numbers and say the sample is too small, rather than ranking on one run.

The apps behind our measurements

The paid providers we track, and what we can verify about each

We rank on what we can check. Each of the five below publishes a location in this use; the tables are our own counts and the providers' own published terms, not a summary of their marketing.

ExpressVPN: the widest spread of cities

ExpressVPN publishes more multi-city countries than anyone else in our set — 11 countries where you can pick between two or more locations, including 56 in the United States, 7 in the United Kingdom, 6 in Australia and 4 in Japan. If your problem is a blocked address rather than a missing country, that spread is the thing that gets you out of it. It is the most expensive option here, and it is the one we would pick for streaming.

ExpressVPN in use

NordVPN: the largest country list, and the one we measured

NordVPN covers more countries than anything else we track. It is also one of the two services we measured ourselves, so the retention figures above are its actual numbers rather than a claim. It operates from Panama, has been audited by Deloitte, allows 10 simultaneous connections, and lists obfuscated servers and a kill switch among its features — the two things that matter where VPN traffic is filtered.

NordVPN in use

Surfshark: unlimited devices, and level with NordVPN in half our tests

Surfshark is the other service in our own measurements. In London and New York it was level with NordVPN; in Tokyo and Los Angeles it trailed by 11% and 17%. It places no limit on simultaneous connections, which makes it the sensible choice for a household rather than a person. Audited by Deloitte, operating from the Netherlands, with Camouflage Mode for networks that filter VPN traffic.

Surfshark in use

CyberGhost: the longest money-back window, with a catch

CyberGhost's 45-day money-back guarantee is the longest here, and it is the reason it appears on most lists. Read the condition: 45 days applies to the six-month and two-year plans, and the monthly plan gets 14 days. It publishes 10 multi-city countries, with 11 locations in the United States, but only a single city in Japan — so it is a weaker choice if Japanese services are your target.

CyberGhost in use

Private Internet Access: unlimited connections, US jurisdiction

PIA places no limit on devices and publishes an Advanced Kill Switch, obfuscation, multi-hop and port forwarding. Its no-logs claim has been audited by Deloitte Audit Romania. The trade-off is jurisdiction: it operates from the United States, which some readers will rule out on principle. We list it because the rest of the record is strong and because it is one of only four providers with two or more cities in Japan.

Private Internet Access in use

Frequently asked questions

What is a VPN, in one paragraph?

A VPN is an encrypted connection between your device and a server run by the provider. Everything you send goes through that tunnel, so the network you are sitting on sees only an encrypted link to one address, and the sites you open see the server's address rather than yours. That is the entire mechanism; the differences between providers are about where the servers are, how fast the route is, and what the provider keeps.

Can I use a free VPN for this?

Usually not, and the reason is measurable rather than moral. Even on paid services we measured, between 10% and 60% of the raw line disappears into the tunnel — in Tokyo a 780 Mbps line came out at roughly half. Free tiers add a data cap and a much smaller server list on top of that. They also have to earn money somewhere, and where the product is free the revenue usually comes from the traffic itself.

Will it slow my connection down?

Yes, and we have measured how much: across 14 cities and 46 paired runs, between 40% and 90% of the raw line survived the tunnel. The variation between cities is wider than the variation between providers — London kept about 90% on both services we tested, Tokyo about half. If a VPN feels slow, the route is a more likely explanation than the provider.

What else is a VPN good for?

The everyday case is public Wi-Fi, where the network operator would otherwise see every site you connect to. The other common ones are reaching services from home while travelling — banks and government portals refuse foreign addresses constantly — and comparing prices that vary by country. We publish the underlying server and speed data for all of it on our open data page.

Conclusion

The honest version is narrow: free tiers are fine for encrypting a public connection and for checking whether something is reachable. For anything that needs sustained throughput or a specific country, the measured gap is not close.

We publish the speed runs and the coverage counts behind that conclusion so you can disagree with our reading of them.

Every figure on this page comes from our own daily collection or our own measurements. The files are published as open data under CC BY 4.0, and the method — including what the numbers do not prove — is on how we test.