Best VPN, judged on what each provider prints and what it renews at

Printed prices, verified

Four questions that pick a provider faster than a feature list

1. How long will you actually keep it?. The headline price is the price of a prepaid term, usually two to three years. If you would cancel after six months, the monthly plan is the honest comparison and the ranking changes completely: the same providers that lead on the two-year headline sit near the top of the monthly column.
2. What does it renew at?. Nine of the eleven priced providers here renew at a multiple of their headline. The renewal is printed on the same page as the intro on most of them, and it is the number you will pay for every year after the first term. A provider that prints no renewal at all is telling you something too.
3. What are you running it on?. A laptop is easy and every provider covers it. A smart TV, a router or a games console is not: four providers in this index publish a smart TV page and five publish a router page, and those are the ones with an app rather than a manual setup guide.
4. Does the no-logs claim have anything behind it?. Five providers here publish a dedicated no-logs page. A published policy is not an audit, and this site does not rank on audits it has not read; what it can tell you is which providers put the claim in writing on their own domain, and where.

The gap between the headline and the renewal

The pattern is consistent enough to be the defining fact of the market. Private Internet Access prints $1.79 a month, which buys a three-year-and-three-month term, and then autorenews at $69.81 every three years. CyberGhost prints $1.99 a month on a 26-month prepay and renews at $51.74 a year. ExpressVPN prints $2.99 and renews at $99.95 a year. NordVPN prints $3.49 and renews at $139.08 a year. Each of those pairs is quoted verbatim from the provider's own page in the table above.

Note what that does to the ranking. On the headline, the four are within $1.70 of each other. On the renewal they are not close at all, and the provider with the lowest headline is not the provider with the lowest standing price. Anyone who compares this market on the first column alone is comparing sales copy.

The two providers that price differently

IVPN prints one price per term and no discount: $6 a month, $60 a year. Mullvad prints a flat EUR 5 a month with no term at all, which is why it sits outside this USD index rather than inside it. Neither has an intro price, so neither has a renewal to fall off.

That makes them the most expensive providers in the index on the headline and, past the first term, not the most expensive at all. Whether that is worth paying depends entirely on the first question above: how long you will actually keep it.

Common questions

Which VPN is cheapest?

On the printed headline, Private Internet Access at $1.79 a month, which requires a three-year-and-three-month prepayment. On the standing price after the first term, the ranking is different and the table's renewal column shows it.

Is a more expensive VPN better?

Not reliably, and this site does not claim to know. What the index can show is that price and prepaid term move together on this shelf: the cheapest month is always the longest commitment.

Why do the prices here differ from the ones I see?

Consumer VPN pricing runs named sales that change the headline every few weeks, and some providers show a different figure by country. Every figure here carries the date it was read and a link to the page it came from; check that page before you pay.

Browse by use case

• Compare VPN for smart TV on printed prices
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