The law, the ISPs and local pricing in Bangladesh, in detail
Legal status. Using a VPN is legal in Bangladesh and no law restricts personal use. The instruments that matter are content laws rather than tool laws: the Digital Security Act 2018, replaced by the Cyber Security Act in 2023 and amended again after the 2024 change of government, has been used to arrest people for what they posted, including Facebook comments. The Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission orders platform blocks and, in 2024, ordered the mobile networks off entirely. None of that turns on whether a VPN was involved. Source: Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulation Act 2001; Cyber Security Act 2023 (replacing the Digital Security Act 2018).
What ISPs do. Grameenphone, Robi and Banglalink carry most users, with fibre from Link3, Amber IT and others in Dhaka and Chittagong. Bangladesh routes almost all international traffic through a small number of submarine cable landings and terrestrial links to India, which is what made a national shutdown so simple to execute in 2024. Protocol-level VPN blocking is not in normal use, so plain WireGuard connects fine. The risk here is not filtering, it is the switch.
Commonly blocked: Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and TikTok, blocked for extended periods during and after the July 2024 protests, the entire internet, shut down nationally for five days from 18 July 2024 and mobile data for longer, adult sites, blocked comprehensively, some opposition news outlets and blogs, blocked episodically, gambling sites.
Paying locally. Bangladeshi cards are limited for foreign currency and most consumer cards cannot pay a dollar subscription without a dollar endorsement from the bank. Cryptocurrency is legally discouraged. In practice many people buy through a relative abroad or use a provider with a usable free tier, which is why the free options carry real weight on this page.
3 
Unlimited devices at the lowest headline price of the big three; same owner as NordVPN.
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- Owner
- Nord Security
- Jurisdiction
- Netherlands · Nine Eyes
- No-logs audit
- Deloitte, 2025 (report not public)
- Price
- from $2.19/mo · ~$4.41/mo over 3 yrs after renewal
The cheapest of the large providers on a two-year term, with unlimited devices, which fits households and shared family accounts. Servers in India and Singapore give Dhaka acceptable latency, and Camouflage mode is there if it is needed.
Netherlands jurisdiction inside the Nine Eyes group, and the renewal roughly triples.
- Unlimited simultaneous connections
- Cheapest two-year intro among the major brands
- Deloitte no-logs audit (2023) and Cure53 app audits
- Renewal is about three times the intro price
- Owned by Nord Security, which also owns NordVPN
- Netherlands base sits inside the Nine Eyes
The thing a VPN cannot do
Most country pages on this site explain how to get around a block. This one has to start with the opposite: in July 2024, Bangladesh turned the internet off, and no VPN in the world helped anyone.
On 18 July, during the student protests over public sector job quotas, the government cut international connectivity. Mobile data went next and stayed off longer. For roughly five days a country of 170 million people had no internet at all. A VPN is a tunnel through a working connection. When the connection is gone there is nothing to tunnel through, and every app on your phone showed the same spinner.
This matters because the marketing in this industry implies otherwise. If you take one thing from this page, take that a VPN solves filtering, not absence. Bangladesh has had both, and they call for different preparation. For a shutdown, what helps is offline maps, cached documents, mesh messaging apps that work over Bluetooth, and a satellite or roaming SIM if you can get one. Not a VPN subscription.
What a VPN did solve here
When connectivity came back, the platforms did not. Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp and TikTok stayed blocked for weeks, which is ordinary domain-level blocking that any VPN defeats. Installs in Bangladesh rose by thousands of percent, among the sharpest surges measured anywhere in recent years, and they stayed elevated long after the platforms were restored, because a population that has been cut off once does not uninstall the tool.
That is the realistic case for a VPN in Bangladesh today. Ordinary filtering, applied episodically, sometimes for weeks, usually around politics. Plus the everyday reasons that apply anywhere: public Wi-Fi in Dhaka cafés, an ISP that sees every domain you visit, and adult sites that are blocked comprehensively and permanently.
Why payment, not privacy, decides the pick here
The unusual constraint in Bangladesh is buying the thing. Most consumer cards cannot make a foreign currency transaction without a dollar endorsement from the bank, a process most people will not go through for a five dollar subscription. Cryptocurrency is officially discouraged. The result is that a large share of Bangladeshi VPN users are on free tiers, and the choice of which free tier is the most consequential decision on this page.
It is also the most dangerous one. The free VPNs that rank highest in the app stores are overwhelmingly advertising-funded, and a free VPN funded by advertising is a company that has both your traffic and a commercial reason to look at it. In a country where people have been arrested over Facebook comments, adding a second party who knows what you read is a real cost, not a theoretical one.
Proton’s free tier is the exception worth naming: unlimited data, no advertising, a Swiss non-profit foundation behind it, and open-source apps. Windscribe’s ten gigabytes a month is second, and it accepts more payment routes than anyone else here if you do decide to pay.
Latency, and where to connect
Bangladesh routes nearly all international traffic through a small number of submarine cable landings plus terrestrial links through India. That concentration is exactly why a national shutdown was administratively simple, and it also shapes performance: Singapore and Indian exits are a short hop from Dhaka, European ones are not, and American ones are worse again. Connect regionally unless you specifically need a European or American address.
Protocol-level VPN blocking is not in normal use, so plain WireGuard connects without trouble. Every pick here has an obfuscated mode anyway, because a government that has already switched the internet off has demonstrated its willingness to escalate.
What we have not measured
We have not run probes from inside Bangladesh, and we are not showing a per-provider works-or-not table for that reason. The blocking described here is documented at the platform level from public reporting and network measurement projects; the per-provider detail is not something we can honestly claim. When we have a Bangladeshi vantage point, this page gains that table with a date on it.
