Alternative to Express VPN (price increase)

VPN Forum
1

So, over the last 6-12 months I’ve become less and less satisfied with the Express VPN service. More and more sites seem to have their IP’s flagged and blocked. The UK servers are almost all blocked by BBC and the one that works can be slow, but it’s getting to the point where even a local restaurant wouldn’t let me access their website via Express VPN.

I accept that it’s an ongoing game of “whack-a-mole”, but it doesn’t feel as if Express VPN are quick enough to add new locations or modify existing locations once they’ve been so widely flagged as VPN traffic.

Anyway, chances are, despite all these issues, I would have renewed my subscription rather than have to look around and try unfamiliar software… however… I received an email the other day in which they have flagged a price increase:
“So we’re having to do something we have managed to avoid since we started ExpressVPN back in 2009: Update our prices. At the end of your current 12-month term, your plan will renew on 2023-06-11 at $116.95 USD”
This is up $17 on the $99.95 I paid last year, for what is in my opinion, a less functional service.

They have justified this price increase by trumpeting their additional features:
"Up to 8 simultaneous VPN connections—up from 5
A built-in password manager, Keys, for all your devices"
Five was plenty and I already have a password manager thanks… Can’t I just pay for a simple VPN service without you trying to push unwanted additional products on me at an additional cost?

Anyway, I’ve decided it’s time to find a new provider. So can anybody share any service they have used and would recommend? I would also appreciate advice such as “avoid xyz”, from users who have signed up for a poor service.

Necessary: no logs, use on 3-5 devices, servers in multiple countries (the more the better), reliable UK IP addresses, good chat support, kill switch if VPN drops.

Thanks in advance, I sure your suggestions will also help others who will be looking to switch when their renewal comes around.

2

Proton VPN seems fine to me so far. I’ve been using it for a month now and streaming is mostly ok, and they have physical servers in most of the countries they advertise. They offer two years for the new price Express is charging you for one year. I do have to admit there are days when their servers get flagged and lots of them start getting blocked by streaming services, then you gotta keep trying until you find an unblocked server, but they fix it within a couple of days. In my experience, speeds are around 90% of my contracted internet speed. They also offer port-forwarding and servers in Latin America, both of which are important for my needs.

I had TorGuard before and the speeds were also great! And it’s very cheap ($50 for two years). However, they do not have streaming support and their list of countries is rather limited. They do offer port-forwarding, and thus I only used it for torrenting.

3

We appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. We’re not fully active on Reddit, but wanted to jump in to talk with you about this directly.

ExpressVPN was founded in 2009, with a subscription price of $99 - and this is the very first time we’ve increased our prices. While no one likes a price change, unfortunately the costs we face in delivering the premium service of ExpressVPN have gone up over the past 14 years.

To keep up to the challenges of the ever changing and increasingly complex world of cybersecurity, we must keep investing in our infrastructure and innovation. We hope that our users understand this, and appreciate the high quality of protection we provide and so stick with us.

As mentioned, we’re not in this channel a lot, so if you want more information, we encourage you to get in touch with our Support Team, who are online 24/7 ready to help.

4

Just to give an update, went with Proton in the end, very happy. I think it’s even better than ExpressVPN and definitely at a better price point.

5

damn like 5 years ago you could have a vpn for 3 buck a month, what happenned

6

renew it, just trust me, there is no better vpn, ive tested them all

7

I’ve used Mullvad for a long time, I’ve never had any problems, has everything you’re looking for and it’s cheap too.

8

So, recently I had some issues with excessive data usage on wifi as well as the delayed notifications (I made a post a few weeks back). Since then I’ve been trying MozillaVPN and NordVPN, and I’m leaning toward Nord at the moment. MozillaVPN is ok, but I have had some issues on my phone where the app just stops working so there’s not even a “disconnected” notification status, almost as if I had force closed it. I turned off battery optimizer for it and Nord but only Mozilla had that problem. I’m going to be testing other clients now. Nord has been great, speeds aren’t as fast as ExpressVPN in similar regions, but it’s not too bad. The one thing I like about Mozilla is the phone masking, but without bundling it and relay and the vpn it’s kind of expensive. For just the vpn service, though, Nord has good performance and UI. It’s also improved greatly since the 6-ish years since I last tried it.

9

I changed to Proton and couldn’t be happier.

10

$17 increase is kinda a lot for the same thing =/

11

I like ExpressVPN and have used it for years but it has always been very expensive for me even at $99.95 a year, now that it’s going to $116.95 I really don’t think I can afford it anymore. This is especially true since I find myself having to turn it off anyway to visit websites more and more every day because websites are learning to block VPN’s. If I have to constantly turn it off what’s the point of having it?

I understand costs are high for everything but adding things like a password manager seems like a waste of their resources and adds unnecessary costs that the customer will eventually have to pay for one way or another.

I would have rather had them spend resources developing ways to prevent websites from detecting VPNs because that is a real problem these days. For example, putting way less customers on each IP address they have could help. I’m sure they could figure out other ways also. That kind of stuff would justify the price increase to me.

12

This is price gouging.

13

Am staying with ExpressVPN. It’s just 16 bucks more a year. I have used, Surfshark, NordVPN, CactusVPN, WeVPN and SmartyDNS and none of these were as reliable on my Android TV as ExpressVPN here in Germany.

I have only experienced one incident with Hulu and Peacock not working and ExpressVPN fixed it pretty quickly. Other than this, the service has run great. The other services were constantly going down/blocked and it took days for them to get streaming services working again. Good luck for those who are leaving. Let us know how it goes. :slightly_smiling_face:

14

US E-VPN customer, too, and got that increase effective next April. Express is a great VPN but at $99/yr it’s the priciest and this 17% increase is more an aggravation than a financial issue, but it caused me to survey the market and I’ve settled on NordVPN as my next service. It’s in the Top 3 across all vpn review sites and it’s really inexpensive when purchased for multi-years. It matches E-VPN feature-for-feature, benefit-for-benefit so I’m not sacrificing anything in switching. Just wish I could get a pro-rated refund from Express so I could switch immed.

15

I changed to Proton too and been there almost two years and I’ll keep using it.

16

While no one likes a price change…

People will wear a price change if the concomitant services improve beyond simple ‘cosmetic’ changes. The increasing blocking of EVPN servers, worldwide, is worrying, to say the least - something you failed to address in your, rather bland and uninformative, corporate comment.

Perhaps, listening to your customers more would be a reasonable thing to do.

17

I’m staying with you. The service is always improving and your support is good.

18

Can you address your acquisition by KAPE Technologies and their less than stellar track records with a) privacy and spyware; and b) them owning several (if not most) VPN “review” sites?

19

Thanks for this I too got an email saying it’s going to be increased to $116 - $116!!! That’s mad. Anyway I was looking at surf shark but unfortunately that’s slow but has decent perks but I just tried proton and it had a free version which was just as fast as Express (on free version too) so I’ll definitely be switching to Proton at the end of this month once my subscription expires.

20

Alright Express VPN agent ತ⁠_⁠ತ