This is to anyone who is considering to purchase their services, especially in light of their Lifetime service offer. I know they are always running Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals. I purchased a lifetime plan in 2016 for $19.99 for Black Friday. It still works and so far until now that has been a big plus, but there have been some HUGE changes.
Most importantly, torrenting has been all but stopped on their services. They claim that they still allow it but do not be fooled. The number of servers that allows torrenting was reduced to 3 recently (Paris, Bucharest & Ontario servers only). The biggest change, though, is the software itself: Running their VPN program has not only restricted what can access their VPN but also what can access the internet even while this software is running in the background without being connected. You can stop the VPN session, leave the program running, and it will still limit your connections to the internet with or without the kill switch engaged. This happened after a routine update. I uninstalled and reinstalled the software to no avail and even used another computer with a clean install. . I used Vuze, qBittorent and uTorrent, and none could connect to peers even when peers were trying to connect (Vuze registering a NAT problem and specifically saying the TCP/UDP ports were not open, for ever single configuration tried). I can no longer run Tor Browser with their VPN software running in the background, nor I2P, and this was not a problem until now. I’ve tried many different TCP, UDP ports, binding/not binding etc. It just blocks anything that’s not Firefox, Edge, Chrome etc, regardless of workarounds and whatever open ports you route through. I couldn’t get Windows Updater to connect even. This has been a significant and disturbing departure from the service I had reliably used (even though it wasn’t that good) for years.
Their streaming servers have had a huge change as well. Instead of having servers listed for streaming generically, they now list a specific server for each streaming service. There is one specific server for Netflix, one for Hulu, one for HBO Max etc. For the record, I have not had luck with their streaming servers in the past. They used to share the San Francisco torrent server with the streaming services and that was the one I used. Before Netflix cracked down on VPNs I was able to use this and it connected, but still obviously recognized it as a US server and gave me US content on the desktop version. It was also incredibly slow and took several minutes to buffer. The new setup for servers for specific services, just connecting to them with the web browser, shows they are all US based. My interest in using the streaming service would be for changing geographic locations for content libraries. If they are all US based, why bother even? If you don’t use any of the top streaming services ( or even the BBC iPlayer), you potentially will not be able to use their streaming service. I have not tried with the standalone apps but it doesn’t look promising and definitely won’t be fast. Which brings me to the next issue.
Speeds have considerably decreased across the servers. I ran different speed tests on sites and was getting between 98-112 kbps each time in download speeds. Their servers were never super fast but I could download a 1.5GB file in about 30-45 minutes each time. Now, I wait about a minute and a half for pages to load.
If you’re considering to get a VPN service, I know this looks enticing. Your money will be better spent elsewhere however. For $20-30 once, this service was okayish, but for anything over that, absolutely not. I guess I got my money’s worth out of it. For anyone else, I do not recommend.