A provider that shows you its network
Every VPN company claims capacity. AirVPN is the only one in our catalogue that lets you check.
Its site publishes live statistics for every server it operates: current load, bandwidth in and out, how many users are connected right now. Not a marketing page updated quarterly, but a live view, visible without an account, for anyone who wants to look.
This is a genuinely unusual thing to do, and it is worth understanding why nobody else does. A provider advertising a large server count does not want you to know that most of those servers carry almost no traffic, or that the popular ones are saturated at nine in the evening. Publishing the numbers forecloses that. AirVPN publishes them, and the numbers are modest, and the company appears untroubled by that.
For a technical user this changes how the service is used. You pick a server because you can see it is quiet, rather than because the app suggested it.
The iPhone problem, stated plainly
There is no AirVPN app on the App Store.
This deserves emphasis because searching for AirVPN there returns several apps that are not AirVPN, published by companies with no connection to it. We looked: the results include products from entirely unrelated sellers using the name. Installing one of those would be a mistake, and it is the sort of mistake this site exists to prevent.
The supported route on iOS is the official WireGuard or OpenVPN client with a configuration file you generate on AirVPN’s site. It works, and there is a defensible argument that running an open-source client with a config file you control is better than trusting a proprietary app. It is also more setup than most people want, it means no in-app server switching, and it is why AirVPN does not appear on our best VPN for iPhone page or in our iPhone rankings, which are built from App Store review analysis and have nothing to analyse here.
Italy is the structural objection
Air srl is Italian, and Italy participates in the Fourteen Eyes intelligence sharing arrangement.
For the large majority of users this is theoretical. Nobody’s Netflix habits are of interest to a signals intelligence arrangement. But this site’s privacy rankings weigh jurisdiction because for a minority of users it is the entire question, and on that measure Italy is worse than Switzerland, Sweden or Panama, which is where the providers above AirVPN on that page are based.
The company is candid about its location and does not obscure it, which is more than several better-known providers manage.
Port forwarding, and why torrenters care
AirVPN offers real port forwarding, configured per port through the account panel.
This has become rare. Several large providers removed port forwarding after abuse complaints, and others advertise it while providing something more limited. For a torrent user the difference is between connectable and not connectable, which affects ratio and download performance directly. Our torrenting page treats it as a primary criterion, and AirVPN is one of the few providers that still satisfies it properly.
Honest pricing
| Plan | Intro | Renewal | True cost per month over 3 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | €7.00 | €7.00 | €7.00 |
| 1 year | €54.00 | €54.00 | €4.50 |
| 3 years | €120.00 | €120.00 | €3.33 |
No introductory rate, no renewal increase, no countdown timer. What you pay in year one is what you pay in year four.
That deserves recognition, because the industry norm is an advertised price that triples at renewal, which our true cost calculator exists to expose. AirVPN needs no such tool applied to it.
Features and limits
WireGuard and OpenVPN, with obfuscation options including tunnelling over SSL and SSH. Around 260 servers in 23 countries, which is small and openly stated as small. Five simultaneous connections. Port forwarding. Open-source desktop client, called Eddie. Cryptocurrency accepted. A 30-day refund period.
No multi-hop. No streaming capability worth the name, and the company does not pretend otherwise. No mobile apps of its own. No audit.
Where it lands
AirVPN is a good provider for a narrow set of people: technical users who value seeing the network, torrenters who need port forwarding, and anyone worn down by introductory pricing. For those people it is genuinely worth the trouble.
For everyone else the absence of an iPhone app is disqualifying before any other consideration, and the Fourteen Eyes jurisdiction is the reason it does not displace Mullvad or IVPN for privacy-first buyers who want the same independence with a better address.
What we have not tested
We have not run our own speed, leak or censorship tests on AirVPN. Its scores here marked pending stay pending until we have. Ironically this is the one provider whose own published statistics let you check part of what we would otherwise measure.