A storage company’s second act
MEGA is a cloud storage business. Its distinguishing claim is that files are encrypted in the browser before upload, so the company cannot read what it stores, and that claim has been examined by academic cryptographers over the years with findings the company has responded to.
The VPN arrived in 2024 as an addition to that business. It is young, it is simple, and it is priced as an attachment rather than as a product expected to win on its own.
That framing is the right one for evaluating it. As a bonus attached to storage you already buy, it is fine. As a VPN chosen deliberately, it does not survive comparison with the rest of this catalogue.
The jurisdiction problem is real here
New Zealand is a founding member of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing arrangement, alongside the United States, United Kingdom, Canada and Australia.
For MEGA’s storage product this matters comparatively little, and that is not a dodge. If the encryption works as described, the company holds files it cannot read, and a legal demand produces ciphertext. The jurisdiction is close to irrelevant when the provider is genuinely blind to the content.
A VPN is a different shape of problem. The provider necessarily handles your traffic and sees which addresses you connect to, even when it chooses not to record any of it. What protects you is a policy, and what tests a policy is a legal demand in the jurisdiction the company sits in. New Zealand is one of the five jurisdictions this industry’s privacy-conscious users most consistently avoid.
MEGA does not hide this and there is nothing deceptive about it. It is simply a structural fact that ranks the product below Proton VPN in Switzerland, Mullvad in Sweden or NordVPN in Panama on our privacy ranking, before any feature is considered.
No audit, and no refund window
There is no published no-logs audit.
More unusually, there is no money-back guarantee on the standalone plan. Nearly every provider in this catalogue offers 30 days, and several offer more. The absence means you cannot try the service and get your money back if it does not suit you, which for a product this new and this untested by anyone independent is a meaningful cost. Our comparison tool treats the refund window as a real feature for exactly this reason.
What it does
WireGuard, and only WireGuard. That is a defensible modern choice rather than a limitation for most users, since WireGuard is fast and well reviewed, but it means no fallback when a network interferes with it.
Ten simultaneous connections. Around 30 countries. Apps on iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, Linux and the browser, which is broader platform coverage than several larger providers manage. Cryptocurrency accepted through the MEGA account.
Absent: obfuscation, split tunnelling, multi-hop, port forwarding, Tor integration, and any streaming capability worth naming. The absence of obfuscation excludes it from every censored country covered on this site.
What it costs
| Plan | Intro | Renewal | True cost per month over 3 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | €5.00 | €5.00 | €5.00 |
| 1 year | €50.00 | €50.00 | €4.17 |
No introductory trick, which is welcome and follows the same honest pattern as AirVPN. At those prices standalone it is more expensive over three years than Surfshark and offers a fraction of the capability.
The real number for most buyers is different. Included with a larger MEGA storage plan, the marginal cost approaches nothing, and free is a price no comparison can beat.
Where it lands
Buy it if you already pay MEGA for storage and want a tunnel for public Wi-Fi. It works, it costs you nothing extra, and there is no reason to add a second vendor for that use.
Do not buy it standalone. For the same money you get a provider with an audit, obfuscation, a refund window, streaming, and an address outside the Five Eyes. That comparison is not close.
What we have not tested
We have not run our own speed, leak or censorship tests on MEGA VPN, and this is a product where independent testing of any kind is scarce because of how new it is. Its scores here marked pending stay pending until we have measured them ourselves.