I’m using protonVPN free subscription and it seems to good to be true. The speed is decent and there’s major servers in the US and Europe. There doesn’t appear to be a data limit, no ads, and its not a trial, its free unlimited. Yeah, only one device at a time, but then I’ll just make another protonmail account which you have unlimited of. So what’s the catch? How is it so good? They must be selling my data or something right? It can’t just be enticing us to their paid plans cause the free plan has plenty, no need to go to paid when the free one is this good.
Nope, there’s not really a catch. The free servers are subsidized by the paid users, and it’s used as a gateway for people to get into paid Proton services. This makes sense not only from both a user-friendliness perspective, since not everyone can afford to pay, but also from a marketing perspective, since it allows people to test out your product and to see what it’s like without paying anything. At the end of the day, the free servers are pretty crowded and people may get captchas often, so a portion of the people do upgrade, or even buy mail along with VPN.
Remember that as per their Terms of Service, you can’t create multiple free accounts. A couple maybe, and unlimited paid accounts, but not unlimited free accounts.
Some of us pay, although we only need one VPN and can get it free, to support the cause as it is. It’s a small expense for what they provide and for how much we are spending for internet, telephone, etc.
Buy one less fancy coffee a month, pay for Proton.
"Why we offer a free VPN
We believe online privacy is a fundamental human right. Providing free access is part of our mission. The Proton VPN free plan is unlimited and designed for security. No catches, no gimmicks. Just online privacy and freedom for those who need it.
Our free VPN service is supported by paying users. If you would like to support our mission, please consider upgrading."
Proton has an established privacy-keeper opinion and I’m sure they are not selling any data anywhere. It’s actually the best free VPN plan in the market, but it has its limitations obviously.
The only complaint I have is about Android app. I don’t know why but often it cuts me off the internet even though I don’t have kill-switch enabled. Now I use OpenVPN with Proton servers configuration files
Proton VPN Plus plan worth every second of VPN usage, I would sale everything unnecessary of mine just to buy it, btw Proton (the company behind Proton VPN) offered a Free plan for everyone with real intention (no bullshit, no hidden backdoor, no collect data, no sale data), you should be very careful when trusting a VPN providers, Proton VPN is also one of them, and it clearly one of the best (transparency included)
I know this post is 2+ years old, but I just got the free version of Proton VPN today, and it’s been working perfectly so far.
For some reason my ISP (T-Mobile) uses a lot of IP addresses that Spamhaus has flagged. I’m a moderator on a PC forum, and often times I can’t post because my IP address is flagged. To get around it I would use the VPN included with my Bitdefender AV, but it has a 200MB daily limit, and I would often forget to disable the VPN after posting something. When I would do so, I would subsequently blow through that 200MB in short order, then when I needed to post again I couldn’t for 24 hours. Restarting my modem would generate a new IP address, but that wasn’t always foolproof, as sometimes the new one would be flagged as well.
So far this free Proton VPN has done the trick. And I’m actually shocked that a free VPN is unlimited. Granted, the service has its limitations, but for my needs it’s perfect.
It most certainly does seem too good to be true, but it’s not.
2 years later, I finally found the catch: Sometime in early March 2024 they stopped allowing free users to pick their country. Now you get assigned the fastest server which is normally the one geographically closest to you (I read somewhere and so far its matched my experience), and you can only attempt to change servers every 2 minutes, so even if they still offer free servers across the world, it will be hard to reliably get a server far away. That’s too bad because country selection was critical for my VPN needs. Up until this week tho, I’ve been using Proton VPN for the last two years for free with no catch seemingly. Oh well, I knew it was pry too good to be true. Still appreciate them for everything else tho and their free service up until now.
I used free ProtonVPN for a while and upgraded to paid. I still use free ProtonMail; I haven’t yet needed to upgrade that to paid, but I’m reasonably certain at some point I’ll want to. Proton along with Bitwarden are companies I love and companies I love to pay.
No catch to my knowledge; been using for a year now and it’s brilliant.
Using Proton VPN eats away at your data consumption, so unless you have unlimited plan, there’s a major catch!
No peer to peer but other than that its great. i get 800 mbps on a 1 gbps connection with the free plan
I know this post is old but do they have bandwidth limit when it comes to downloading files in proton vpn free?
Not for me, cant even connect to Egypt
Work only one conection,if download one file you cant see youtube,other site etc
Oh there is always a catch. Its almost never something is free in this world. Its probably your use case isn’t complicated and only touches the product lightly. When you need and start using the product as intended you will start feeling the shortcuming of the free version. The ads ? speed ? only can connects to servers on the other side of the pacific ? Its annoying unfortunately, again its the world we live in not the company. I wish its done in a different way though.
Crazy! Thanks for the info. Just seems weird cause everyone who I talk to about it say if it’s free, it can’t be safe. Like people in high stakes situations who need a VPN cause they’re traveling thru an authoritarian country or something would never trust a free one.
That’s a good point about just getting people in, cause now the additional cloud storage and mail domains are packaged in their paid plans, so they just need the exposure for those.
And how is this enforced or monitored? Especially if the multiple accounts aren’t even on the same device?
Like you telling me the only catch is in their terms of service they’re like please don’t abuse us??
I can assure you I never buy fancy coffee. I respect and appreciate the cause but certainly not the one I’d donate to if I was flush with cash, especially considering it’s a for profit Swiss company.
I have iOS so don’t know anything about that. But yeah makes sense I guess. Good to know that’s for the info!