Free VPN: what you pay when you don't pay

How do free VPNs make money?

Four ways. Advertising, with usage data collected to target it; data brokerage, selling your browsing destinations to third parties; freemium, where a limited tier exists to sell the paid one; and, worst of all, turning your device into an exit node, so strangers' traffic reaches the internet through your own address.

That fourth model is not hypothetical. In 2015, the Hola browser extension was found to be reselling its free users' bandwidth through a sister company, so those users' home connections were carrying traffic they never saw.

Only the freemium model is compatible with privacy, and even then within clear limits. If a free service does not explain how it pays for its servers, the answer is probably one of the first two, and the product being sold is you.

Is a free VPN safe?

It depends entirely on who runs it. A 2016 academic study of 283 Android apps that requested VPN permissions found that about 18% did not encrypt traffic at all, and about 38% were flagged for malware or adware by the scanning engines the researchers used. Many asked for permissions unrelated to running a VPN.

The study came from researchers at CSIRO's Data61 in Australia, the University of New South Wales, and the International Computer Science Institute at Berkeley, and was presented at the Internet Measurement Conference; the full paper is linked in the sources at the end of this page.

Independent audits since then keep surfacing the same patterns: embedded tracking libraries, privacy policies that quietly authorize the sale of data, servers that are not in the country the flag suggests, and DNS leaks that expose the sites you visit even while the tunnel is active.

The cost rarely shows up on a bill. It shows up as more aggressive ads in unrelated apps, accounts compromised after a breach at the provider, or simply a "VPN" that never protected anything.

When a free VPN makes sense

None of this means free is always wrong. The question is whether the trade is visible and whether what you give up is something other than your privacy. A limited tier from a company whose paid product you could name is not the same as an app with a generic name, a flag icon, and no company behind it.

With that in mind, there are situations where free is a reasonable choice, as long as you adjust your expectations:

• Free tiers from well-known companies, with explicit data or location limits and the same privacy policy as the paid plan.
• One-off, low-stakes use, such as opening a site blocked on a school or office network, without logging in to anything sensitive.
• Checking whether a VPN solves your problem at all before you subscribe, knowing that free-tier speed and stability do not represent the paid product.

Free vs. paid VPN: what the money actually buys

What you pay for with a VPN is infrastructure: servers, bandwidth, maintenance, and support. A paid VPN does not need to sell your data because the subscription already covers the costs. That funds three things free apps rarely deliver: a written privacy policy you can hold the company to, servers that are actually where they claim to be, and a limit on devices instead of a limit on data.

SuaVPN works on that model and nothing else. Plans differ only by how many devices you can connect: Basic covers 3, Pro covers 5, and Family covers 10. Every plan uses the same WireGuard protocol and the same locations, which are the ones listed on the status page. There is no app of our own to install: you add a device in your dashboard, receive a WireGuard configuration as a .conf file or a QR code, and import it into the official WireGuard app on Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, or iPhone.

There is no free plan, and that is deliberate. We could not sustain one without doing some version of what this article warns against. Current prices are on the pricing page; if you pay by card, your issuer handles any currency conversion.

How to try a paid VPN without the risk: the 7-day money-back period

SuaVPN is a Brazilian company, so every plan comes with the cancellation right that Brazilian consumer law grants to online purchases: cancel within 7 days of buying and receive a full refund. In practice that works as a complete trial: real servers, real speed on your own connection, real support. If it does not do what you need, cancel and the money comes back.

Payment is by card through Stripe, the subscription renews on its own, and you can cancel at any time, keeping access until the end of the period you paid for. Compared with a free app, the trade is simple: instead of handing over your data for a limited service, you use the full service for a week and then decide.

How to evaluate any VPN, free or paid

Before installing anything, check five things: who the company is and where it is based; what the privacy policy says is collected and for how long; which protocol is used (WireGuard is the current standard); whether the app asks for permissions unrelated to running a VPN; and how the service pays its bills. If any answer is vague, the real price is probably your information.

After installing, run one practical test: connect, then open a site that shows your public IP and a DNS leak test. If either still shows your real location or your ISP's resolvers, the tunnel is not doing its job, no matter what the app's screen says. The check takes a moment and settles most doubts.