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What Is a Virtual Private Network?
A VPN is an app you install on your device to help improve your privacy. When you switch on a VPN, it creates an encrypted connection between your machine and a server operated by the VPN company. All your data is piped to the VPN server before exiting back out onto the internet. When you use a VPN, it prevents your ISP or anyone else from being able to monitor the sites you visit and potentially monetizing that data.
There are other privacy perks, too. A VPN hides your true IP address, concealing your geographic location. VPNs also make it harder for advertisers, and anyone else watching, to monitor your movements across the web—harder, but not impossible. With enough time and effort, a determined adversary is likely to win out.
How We Choose the Best Cheap VPN Services
“Cheap” is a relative word. Among all the VPN providers we test, the average monthly price is $9.89 per month. We decided that about two dollars per month less would qualify as a cheap VPN price and set the cut-off for this list at $8.00 per month.
We also looked to our previous reviews to inform our choices. To qualify for this list, a VPN service needs to have earned at least three out of five stars within the last two years. These are supposed to be the best cheap VPNs, after all.
Some VPN services have tiered plans, offering different features at different prices. We don’t see it often, but if the service has a pricing tier that meets our requirements, it’s eligible for consideration.
How the Best Cheap VPNs Compare Based on Annual Plans
Most VPN services give you a discount for buying longer-term subscriptions, so you pay more upfront (on average, $66.95 for an annual plan among the services we track) but less overall than if you paid the monthly price for a year.
This article focuses on the monthly subscription price because that’s the smallest amount you have to pay upfront. Generally, we recommend that new customers start with the shortest, cheapest plan a VPN offers and upgrade only after they’re sure they’re satisfied.
For anyone thinking long-term, here’s a breakdown of the best cheap VPNs based on their annual subscription prices. Like the list above, these products have all earned at least a three-star rating or better in the last two years. Unlike the list above, we define cheap here as an annual VPN subscription that costs less than $60.
- Kaspersky Secure Connection, $29.99 per year (see the section “What Happened to Kaspersky?” below)
- Private Internet Access VPN, $39.95 per year
- Atlas VPN, $47.83 per year
- CyberGhost VPN, $47.88 per year
- Opera VPN Pro, $47.88
- Bitdefender Premium VPN, $49.99 per year
- Surfshark VPN, $59.76 per year
- privadovpn, $59.88 per year
- TunnelBear VPN, $59.88 per year
- HMA! VPN, $59.88 per year
What Is the Best Free VPN?
The only thing cheaper than cheap is free, and we have also rated the best free VPN services. Some of the services on this list also offer a free version, usually with limitations that are lifted when you pony up some cash.
If you are looking for a free VPN provider, Proton VPN is our top choice. This rare five-start product offers an excellent set of features for less than many competitors, and grants access to a whole suite of privacy services, such as Proton Mail. Although Proton VPN’s free version has some limitations, it places no restriction on bandwidth.
What Happened to Kasperksy?
Kaspersky Secure Connection VPN was on this list of the best cheap VPNs, but recent events have forced us to reconsider our position. Although Kaspersky has faced numerous accusations of somehow being connected to the Russian government, we at PCMag were never presented with clear evidence of wrongdoing to back up these claims. Since we focus on our hands-on analysis of products, we noted the controversies but continued to give Kaspersky products the praise they deserved based on our testing results. This changed with the recent Russian invasion of Ukraine, which prompted governments and organizations to cut ties with Kaspersky. Most importantly, on March 27, 2022, the FCC declared Kaspersky to be a national security risk. As of this writing, no US government agency has retracted the declaration.
We stand by our analysis of Kaspersky products, but we feel recent events demand a different response.
Can the Cheapest VPN Also Be the Fastest VPN?
Many readers have expressed concern that VPNs greatly slow down their internet connection speed. It’s true that a VPN will almost certainly reduce upload and download speeds as well as increasing connection latency.
The good news is that the impact most VPNs have on browsing speeds is minimal, and we see continual industry efforts to reduce that impact further. You can read more about how we evaluate the effect VPNs have on internet speeds in our article on How We Test VPNs. The chart below shows our latest VPN speed testing data for all the services we review.
Mullvad VPN is notably the only service from this list that also made the cut for fastest VPN. You can see our picks for the fastest VPNs and how they compare in the chart below.
However, seeking out the fastest VPN may not be worthwhile. For one thing, the impact a VPN has on your connection will vary greatly depending on what kind of internet connection you have and where you’re connecting from. The VPN server location you’re connecting to can also hamper speed—the further the server, the worse your experience is likely to be. Instead of focusing on speed, we strongly recommend placing more emphasis on trustworthiness, features, and cost.
Do Cheap Services Have VPN Apps?
When looking at VPNs, it’s important to consider what devices you already have and which ones you want to use with the VPN. Most VPN services—and all the ones on this list—have VPN apps for all the major platforms: Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows.
Although you can manually configure devices to use a VPN connection, we strongly encourage you to download the official VPN app directly from the VPN company. Manual configuration is time-consuming and needs to be kept up-to-date in order to function. VPN apps take care of all the set-up and are always up to date, giving you easy access to all the VPN servers each service provides. The official VPN apps also let you use all the extra features that are increasingly part of VPN subscriptions.
VPN apps are also just more pleasant to use. Of the services on this list, IVPN had the most polished apps on all platforms.
What to Look For in a Cheap VPN
Two important features we look for among the best VPNs are split tunneling and multi-hop connections. Split tunneling lets you designate which apps send their traffic through the VPN connection. That way, you don’t have to limit high-bandwidth but low-security activities like streaming or gaming.
Multi-hop connections let you route your traffic through multiple VPN servers. This ensures that even if one of the VPN servers you’ve connected to is compromised, your data remains secure. It’s an extra layer of protection but does come at a cost since your internet speeds will be slowed even more than with a normal VPN connection.
Of the VPN services in this list, Mullvad VPN and IVPN have both multi-hop connections and split tunneling, while Norton Secure VPN only boasts split tunneling. Bitdefender currently offers split tunneling in a few of its VPN apps.
What VPN Protocols Do Cheap Services Support?
VPNs are not new, and there’s a variety of ways to create an encrypted VPN connection. We prefer VPN services that support OpenVPN or WireGuard. Both of these VPN protocols are open-source and can be examined for any potential vulnerabilities. WireGuard is newer technology while OpenVPN is the workhorse of the VPN industry, but we’re happy to see support for this VPN protocol has expanded greatly in recent years.
We break down the complete support for VPN protocols in each review of these services. To summarize: All the VPNs in this list support the OpenVPN protocol, although Mullvad VPN only supports it on certain platforms. Mullvad VPN and IVPN both support WireGuard in all their apps.
Affordability Is Important, But So Is Trust
Make sure you trust your VPN provider. Because all your data is routed through the VPN service, the company could have enormous insight into your activities. The Best VPN services have clear and transparent policies for how your information is protected.
In our reviews, we scour companies’ privacy policies, ask what legal jurisdiction they operate under, and try to understand how they protect customers, so be sure to read those details in our full reviews. If you find a cheap VPN that offers a great deal, but something about it makes you nervous, look for another option. There are plenty to choose from.
Do You Need a VPN?
For some people, VPNs are an essential tool. For anyone living under the threat of oppression or surveillance, a VPN makes it much harder for observers to see what you’re doing online. VPNs can also be used to bypass state-sponsored censorship, letting people freely access the web.
There’s an argument to be made, however, that VPNs are simply overkill for most people. Back in the day when HTTPS was a rarity and public Wi-Fi was the wild west, this encryption was essential for security. But with more sites and services securing themselves appropriately, VPNs have become more of a privacy product, adding another layer of protection…or a tool for streaming geo-restricted content, such as the BBC iPlayer or watching Netflix from another country.
Additional Tools We Recommend to Protect Your Privacy
In addition to using an affordable VPN, you should also make sure you protect yourself in other ways. Advertisers have numerous tricks for gathering data, so use an ad blocker as well as the privacy features of your browser.
Account takeovers are devastating, so protect your accounts with unique passwords from a password manager. Also, be sure to enable multi-factor authentication wherever possible.
Lastly, never underestimate malware. We strongly encourage readers to use standalone Antivirus software.
What’s the Best Cheap VPN?
With different prices, features, and apps, it’s difficult to say which VPN is the best in any situation. When it comes to price, however, it’s a little easier: Mullvad VPN is an excellent product on its own and is also one of the cheapest VPNs on the market. It has all the features we expect from the best VPNs, and the company goes to incredible lengths to protect its customers.
Some of that effort may be too much for everyone, and IVPN is a close second. Although you have to pay more with IVPN to get feature parity with Mullvad VPN, IVPN has many of Mullvad VPN’s features and offers a flexible pricing system that can be bent to fit your budget. We also think IVPN’s apps are a bit easier to use than Mullvad VPN’s.
Once you’ve picked a cheap VPN service, you can get up and running with our feature on how to set up and use a VPN.
(Editors’ Note: While they may not appear in this story IPVanish and StrongVPN are owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.)