Free vs Paid VPN: What's the Real Difference?
Free VPNs are paid for with your data, ads, or throttled speed. Here's what that means in practice and a 10-minute check you can run on any VPN.
The difference between a free and a paid VPN isn't the interface. It's who pays for the servers. If it isn't you, it's ads, trackers, or data about your habits, which are exactly the things a privacy service is supposed to protect you from.
How do free VPNs make money?
Servers and bandwidth cost money, and the bill grows with every new user. A free service covers the gap with in-app ads (the most honest option, since at least you can see what's going on), with third-party trackers, or with its users' data. Sometimes all three.
Two well-known cases. In 2015, researchers took apart the Hola browser extension and found that its users' computers were being used as exit nodes for customers of the company's commercial service. People got free access without always realizing they were paying with their own connection. The second case is Onavo Protect, a free "data protection" app owned by a major social network that collected statistics on how people used their apps. Apple removed it from the App Store in 2018, and the service was shut down in 2019.
A 2016 study showed the scale of the problem. A team from Data61 (CSIRO) and several universities analyzed 283 free Android apps that use the VPN permission. 75% contained third-party tracking libraries, 82% requested access to sensitive data such as accounts and SMS, and in 38% antivirus tools found malicious code. The data is old, and we haven't tested those apps ourselves. But the way a free app makes money hasn't changed since.
What do you lose with a free VPN?
Privacy. A VPN sees all of your traffic. If it keeps logs, you've simply swapped one observer for another: an unknown company instead of your ISP. We covered what your ISP can see in «Приватность в интернете: что знает о вас провайдер».
Connection protection. In the same study, 84% of the apps let some traffic leak outside the tunnel (mostly IPv6 and DNS requests), and 18% didn't encrypt data at all. You sit in a café with a "protected" icon on screen while your requests are as readable as before. Which risks of shared networks are real and which are overblown is covered in our piece on public Wi-Fi security.
Speed. Data caps, one or two overloaded servers, and a queue for the free tier. In the evening, video stalls even on fast home internet. That isn't always the VPN's fault; we wrote about the causes in «Почему видео тормозит только вечером».
Convenience. Usually one device, and no support if the app won't connect.
Free vs paid VPN: side-by-side comparison
| Criterion | Free | Paid |
|---|---|---|
| Source of income | Ads, data, paid upgrades | User subscriptions |
| Trackers in the app | Often present | The business doesn't need them |
| Speed | Throttled, depends on load | No artificial limits (verify with a test) |
| Data | Cap or a "soft" ceiling | Usually unlimited |
| Devices | One or two | Several on one subscription |
| Support | A forum, or nothing | Available |
Paid doesn't automatically mean honest, though. A subscription removes the conflict of interest: the service profits from keeping you satisfied, not from turning you into the product. You still need to check. The signs we use to filter services out are collected in «Семь признаков сервиса, которому можно доверить свой трафик».
How can I check any VPN in 10 minutes?
This works for any service, paid or free.
- Find out how it makes money. If there's no subscription and it's unclear where the money comes from, you're paying with something else.
- Find the data retention policy. It should say plainly what is stored and for how long. If the page is just "we value your privacy" and nothing more, that's not a policy.
- Check the app's permissions. A VPN doesn't need your contacts, SMS, or precise location. What apps know about where you are is covered in our article on app geolocation.
- Run a leak test: turn the connection on and see which IP address and DNS server websites detect. If they're your real ones, the service isn't doing its one job.
- Measure speed in the evening, at peak hours. Free servers often run decently during the day, and the trouble starts later. How to test properly is described in a separate guide.
When is a free VPN good enough?
Sometimes it is. If you need to open a site once, without logging into accounts or paying for anything, a free option from a well-known company with a clear policy is an acceptable risk. For banking, email, work tools, and shared networks while traveling, I wouldn't use one: that's where a mistake costs more than a year of subscription.
How much does a paid VPN cost?
For reference, here's how it looks with us. The "Standard" plan covers 5 devices with unlimited data and costs 349 ₽ per month. Billed yearly, it comes to about 279 ₽ per month. Current prices are always on the pricing page. There's a 7-day trial with no card required, enough to run the checklist above on your own devices and your own connection. We store only your identifier and the fact of payment, and we don't keep a history of the sites you visit. But that's exactly the kind of claim you shouldn't take on faith, so read the policy yourself. To learn how to connect all your devices with a single link, see our article on setting up a secure connection.