Best free VPN in 2026: the ones that are not paid for with your data

The economics, in one paragraph

Running a VPN costs money per user: bandwidth, servers in many countries, engineers to keep them working, support. A free VPN with millions of users is spending millions. The money comes from paying customers of the same company — the model of every provider on this page — or from the free users themselves, through ads, injected trackers, sold browsing data, or, in the worst documented cases, by turning users’ devices into exit nodes for other people’s traffic. Several of the most-downloaded free VPN apps on both app stores have been found doing the second kind. The tell is simple: if you cannot find the company’s name and country in ten minutes, and it has no paid product, you are the product.

What the honest free tiers limit

Every real free tier limits something, and the picks differ in what. Proton limits server choice — the app picks the country — and does not unblock streaming, but sets no data cap and no ads. Windscribe caps data at 10 GB a month but lets you choose among ten countries and includes its tracker blocker. PrivadoVPN and hide.me cap data and throttle speed. TunnelBear caps at 2 GB, enough to try the app. In every case the privacy policy is the same one the paid customers get, which is the property that matters most.

Who the free tier is for

Someone who wants public Wi-Fi covered at the coffee shop and the airport, occasionally, on a phone. A student in India or Turkey for whom a two-year plan is a real expense. Someone in Iran or Russia who cannot pay from inside the country and needs the Stealth protocol to reach the outside world. Someone who wants to try a provider’s app before committing. For all of those, Proton’s free tier or Windscribe’s is the right answer, and both companies are candid that the paid plan is the answer for daily use.

Who it is not for

Streaming, torrenting, gaming, a household, or anyone whose reason for a VPN is daily privacy from an ISP. The caps and the shared servers make free tiers unsuitable for those, and the cheap page on this site shows that a full-featured plan runs $3.50–5 a month once renewals are counted — a price at which the trade-offs of a free tier stop making sense.

The ones to walk away from

Any free VPN with no identifiable company. Any whose privacy policy permits sharing data with advertising partners — Hotspot Shield’s free tier does, from a company that should know better. Any “VPN” that is actually a proxy extension with no encryption. And any free trial that converts to a paid subscription automatically, which is not free at all and is the single largest source of billing complaints in the App Store reviews we analyse. The not recommended list names the ones we track.

What we have not tested

Free-tier speeds and caps are from the providers’ published terms and user reports at the date above. Our own throughput tests on each free tier, at peak and off-peak, are on the list; the throttling claims above will be replaced with numbers when they land.