Honest free options

The question this page answers

"Best free VPN" is one of the highest-traffic searches in this market, and it is also where the industry's worst actors concentrate - a free product cannot pay for servers with subscriptions, so it pays with attention, data or bandwidth[4][5]. This page takes the opposite framing of the classic top-10 list: it does not rank free products by features, it filters by who pays for the servers and what they take in return.

Every tool on this page passes one of two tests. Either the operator is funded by disclosed donations or grants (RiseupVPN publishes its per-person operating costs and asks for contributions instead of charging[1]), or the free tier is a funnel funded by the paid plans above it - Proton VPN's free tier runs on the same audited architecture as its paid product with no ads and no data caps[2], Windscribe grants 10GB/month against a confirmed email[3], and hide.me's free plan exists to upsell the paid one. In both models the "free" part has a named payer.

What the filter excludes - and why the record matters

The excluded models are not hypothetical risks; they are enforcement history. Avast was banned by the FTC from selling browsing data through its Jumpshot subsidiary and paid $16.5M[4]. Facebook's Onavo was pulled by Apple for the same behavior[5]. Hola turned its users into exit nodes and sold the capacity as Luminati - the business that became Bright Data[5]. And when the "free unlimited" apps keep logs, the breach record is the audit nobody commissioned: UFO VPN's exposed 1.2TB database and SuperVPN's 10M-record leak documented IPs, credentials and traffic records[6].

That history is why our scoring gives zero credit to policy-only claims from the ad-funded tier and why this page's population is small. A free app that says "we don't log" without evidence is not on this list - the honest free options either have no incentive to log (Riseup runs no accounts to correlate) or have paid-product economics that do not depend on your profile.

The three honest shapes

The donation-funded collective. RiseupVPN is the reference implementation: an activist collective running since 1999, no account registration, donations requested rather than charged, and unusually honest documentation of what a VPN cannot do[1]. The trade-offs are real - US jurisdiction, no independent audit, a small network - and the provider page says so plainly.

The funnel free tier. Proton VPN Free (unlimited data, no ads, audited architecture[2]) and Windscribe Free (10GB/month, buildable locations[3]) are the practical defaults. The business model is disclosed: the free tier exists to convert you to a paid plan, which aligns incentives - the provider profits when the free experience is good, not when your data sells.

Free software you run yourself. Amnezia's free client turns a rented VPS into your own VPN - the only model where "free" and "no logs" are both structurally true, because there is no operator left to log. The own-vpn-server guide covers the $5/month path and its trade-offs. For censorship-critical use, the obfuscation hub documents which stealth tech ships, and the leak test shows what your current setup actually leaks.

When free is the wrong answer

Free tiers are capped by design - one or two locations, limited throughput, sometimes a data cap. If your threat model is streaming regional catalogs, connecting a whole household, or heavy torrenting, the honest answer is a paid tier checked through the renewal-price lens, not a free app stretched beyond its design. And if your threat model is anonymity, the answer is not a VPN at any price - it is Tor[6].