ExpressVPN review: excellent engineering, expensive, and owned by a company that also owns the referees

Ownership first

ExpressVPN was founded in 2009 and sold in September 2021 to Kape Technologies for $936 million, the largest acquisition in the VPN industry. Kape already owned CyberGhost, Private Internet Access and ZenMate. Earlier in 2021 it had bought Webselenese, the company behind vpnMentor, WizCase and SafetyDetectives, for $149 million. Those three sites publish VPN rankings. ExpressVPN, CyberGhost and PIA appear at or near the top of them, and the shared ownership appears, if at all, in a footer.

Kape’s own history matters too. It was previously Crossrider, an adware distributor, and rebranded in 2018. In 2023 it was taken private by Unikmind Holdings, which is controlled by its largest shareholder, and it no longer files as a listed company, so public information about it has thinned.

None of this makes ExpressVPN a bad VPN. It makes the rankings you see elsewhere something to read with the ownership in mind, which is the point of this site.

Jurisdiction and audits

Express Technologies Ltd is registered in the British Virgin Islands, which has no data retention law and is outside the intelligence alliances, though its parent is UK-headquartered. The engineering record is strong. TrustedServer, the RAM-only server platform, has been audited by PwC (2019) and KPMG (2022); Cure53 has audited the apps and the Lightway protocol, which is open source. In 2017 Turkish investigators seized an ExpressVPN server during the Karlov assassination inquiry and found no logs — one of the few real-world tests of a no-logs claim on record.

Protocols and network

Lightway is ExpressVPN’s own protocol, built on WolfSSL, now rewritten in Rust and open source. It is fast, reconnects in well under a second after a network change, and detects hostile networks and switches to an obfuscated mode without a setting — which is why it has the longest record of any mainstream provider in China and the UAE. OpenVPN and IKEv2 remain available. Around 3,000 servers in 105 countries, all RAM-only. Eight simultaneous connections, the lowest of the majors.

What it costs, honestly

The most expensive major provider on every term. The one-year plan is unusual in renewing at the same price. The two-year intro is real, and it is still more than most rivals’ renewal price. A 30-day money-back guarantee applies to website purchases.

Streaming and censorship

User reports are consistent: Netflix in most regions, BBC iPlayer, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video. MediaStreamer, the DNS-based unblocker, handles consoles and older TVs; the Apple TV app is native. In China and the UAE it is the reference provider; in Russia it works during most blocking rounds; India is served by virtual servers after the 2022 withdrawal.

The iPhone app

This month’s App Store analysis of 2,900 recent reviews scores the app in the top tier — among the highest of any provider we track, with a critical-complaint rate around half of NordVPN’s. Reviewers praise reliability more than anything else. The billing-and-renewal complaint rate is above our flag threshold, mostly App Store subscriptions that renewed unexpectedly. Full breakdown.

Aircove

The only router sold with a VPN pre-installed, from any provider: Wi-Fi 6, per-device location groups, configured from a phone. It counts as one of the eight devices and puts consoles, TVs and guests behind the tunnel. For a household that wants whole-home coverage without a project, it is a genuine differentiator.

What we have not tested

Speed and leaks. Published tests put Lightway among the fastest protocols and the best on reconnect. Our own throughput and DNS/WebRTC/IPv6 tests are pending; the speed dimension is excluded from the score until they land.