2 
Flat €5 a month, no email required, accepts cash; the privacy benchmark.
65
- Owner
- Amagicom AB
- Jurisdiction
- Sweden · Fourteen Eyes
- No-logs audit
- None — apps audited by Cure53, 2024
- Price
- from $5.40/mo
No email address, no username, no account identity at all, and cash accepted by post. In a jurisdiction whose stated direction of travel is tying online activity to real identities, a provider that never learns yours is the most direct possible answer.
Weak for streaming, and its setup expects a more technical user than the other picks.
- Account is a random number, no email or name
- Same price forever, no intro-vs-renewal games
- Accepts cash by post and Monero
- Streaming unblocking is unreliable by design
- Port forwarding removed in 2023
- Smaller server network
A country that would rather know who you are than stop you
Vietnam does block things. Radio Free Asia, VOA Vietnamese, BBC Vietnamese and a long tail of overseas dissident sites go in and out of reachability, and land dispute and anti-corruption blogs disappear regularly. But blocking is not the centre of Vietnamese internet policy, and reading it as a filtering country leads to the wrong VPN.
The centre is identity and location of data. The Cybersecurity Law of 2018, implemented by Decree 53 in 2022, requires certain service providers to keep Vietnamese users’ data inside Vietnam and to maintain a local office. Decree 147, in force from the end of 2024, requires social platforms to verify users against a phone number or national ID and to provide user data on request. The direction is consistent and it is not about walls. It is about attribution.
This is why the weights on this page put privacy well ahead of censorship resistance, which inverts the usual pattern for an Asian country with a one-party government. Getting past a block in Vietnam is easy. The harder question is which company holds an account that can be tied back to you, and under whose law it sits.
Throttling instead of blocking
The most Vietnamese piece of internet policy is the Facebook slowdown. In 2016, and again for around seven weeks in 2020, the state-owned operators degraded Facebook’s local cache servers until the platform became effectively unusable, lifting the restriction once the company agreed to remove more content. Facebook itself confirmed the 2020 episode publicly.
Nothing was blocked. There was no order to point at, no error page, no clean signal that anyone could report as censorship. The service was simply slow, and users blamed their connection. It is an elegant tactic precisely because it is deniable, and it is effective because it applies commercial pressure to a company rather than legal pressure to a citizen.
A VPN defeats it, because the throttling is applied to traffic identified as bound for those servers and a tunnel hides the destination. That is the practical everyday case for a VPN in Vietnam, and it is a good one.
Three operators, all state-linked
VNPT, Viettel and FPT carry essentially all Vietnamese traffic. Viettel is owned by the Ministry of National Defence. VNPT is state-owned. This is not a market with an independent operator to route around, and it is the reason a Vietnamese VPN server is a poor idea for anyone whose interest is privacy: it puts your exit inside the jurisdiction, on infrastructure connected to the same state, while satisfying none of the reasons you wanted a VPN.
Use a Vietnamese exit when a domestic bank or streaming service checks your address, and use Singapore for everything else.
Cables, and why regional exits win
Vietnam’s international connectivity runs through a small number of submarine cables with a long and well-documented record of faults, sometimes several out at once, sometimes for weeks. During a repair period, everything international slows and the difference between a Singapore exit and a Frankfurt one becomes dramatic. Connect regionally by default.
What we have not measured
We have not run probes from inside Vietnam. The throttling described here is documented in public reporting and confirmed by the platform involved; the blocking of specific outlets comes from network measurement projects and user reports across the three operators. We do not publish a per-provider works-or-not table for Vietnam, because protocol-level blocking is not what happens here and a table of ticks would imply a precision we do not have.
Practical setup
Choose on ownership, not on server count. In a country oriented towards attribution, who holds your account is the question, and Proton and Mullvad answer it better than anyone else here.
Do not verify a social account with your real identity and then assume a VPN protects you. Decree 147 is about the account. The tunnel is irrelevant to it.
Pay in a way that survives a card decline. Vietnamese consumer cards are often blocked for foreign subscriptions; cryptocurrency and long single-transaction terms are how people here stay subscribed.
Keep obfuscation available even though you do not need it today. Three state-linked operators carrying all the traffic is a structure that could change policy quickly.
