Ranked on documented facts, not sponsored placement - every provider page shows the evidence.
Short answer: Published providers pass both tests only when the evidence supports it: no conglomerate on record AND no identity anchor at signup. Mullvad, AirVPN and IVPN are the stable examples; the live count is in the strip above, and the list grows only as ownership research confirms it.
providers on this page: 27 · independent audit on file: 33% · court-proven no-logs: 1 · open-source apps: 74%
quick picks
The most honest VPN on the internet, and in 2026 still the one this industry is measured against: numbered accounts, cash or Monero accepted, open-source…
The most credible self-hosting on-ramp in the VPN space, built by and for people inside the censorship: the app is free and open source, you connect it to your…
The anti-affiliate champion candidate holds up: no affiliate program (stated out loud on the homepage), flat honest pricing, quarterly warrant canary, annual…
cryptostorm.is is verifiably LIVE (fetched 2026-09-29, HTTP 200) with a PGP-signed warrant canary dated July 1, 2026 and an unbroken Wayback snapshot record…
Sentinel is real decentralized-VPN infrastructure - an open-source Cosmos chain with on-chain sessions, Wallet-only signup and per-gigabyte pricing that…
A mid-priced, wide-platform, streaming-and-torrenting-capable commercial VPN whose defining 2026 story is the collapse of its own headline promise: the…
A DNS-layer filtering service that has grown up in public: born January-April 2021 out of the Windscribe team (same three founders, spun out precisely because…
The most honest thing to say about Opera's 'VPN' is what Opera's own documentation quietly admits: it is a browser-scoped secure proxy, not a VPN. The Android…
The most trustworthy free VPN on structural grounds: an anarchist Seattle collective that has run since 1999, funds itself by donations, asks no account…
A high-volume, marketing-first VPN whose two most important claims do not survive contact with primary sources. The headline price (USD 1.99/mo) is real only…
Hysteria 2 is not a VPN provider - it is free, MIT-licensed proxy software you deploy on your own server, and this dossier treats it that way: there is no…
The most ambitious attempt to replace the VPN trust model with a market - and one of the least convincing products to actually use. The design is real…
A privacy veteran with real strengths - 8 devices, serious obfuscation stack (Stealth/Stunnel/Shadowsocks/OpenConnect), crypto payments, dedicated IPs and port…
Community-run Italian operator with the best power-user transparency stack in the business: fully open-source Eddie client (GPL-3.0), 258 bare-metal entry IPs…
Not a VPN service - the protocol every commercial VPN wants to be built on, and the most evidence-backed tunnel protocol in existence. You are the provider…
The mainstream default of DNS-level filtering, with a genuinely honest scoping the operator itself states plainly: AdGuard DNS sits at the resolver - it…
The reference point for anonymity - but not a VPN, and this dossier is honest about that. Tor is a US-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit (2006, born from mid-1990s…
I2P is a genuinely different thing from a VPN and should never be bought as one: it is a free, decentralized garlic-routing network optimized for services…
The current state of the art in self-hosted censorship circumvention, and the reason 'buy a VPN' no longer has one right answer for people behind serious…
CalyxVPN is one of the very few genuinely free, genuinely anonymous VPNs - no account, no email, open-source client and server, run by a respected New York…
The strongest case on this site for 'sometimes the answer is a DNS blocker, not a VPN' - and a product whose limits the operator itself does not oversell…
A transparency-first circumvention tool, not a privacy VPN - and it says so itself ('If you require anonymity over the Internet then you should use Tor instead…
The purest renewal-trap economics in the VPN market, now wearing a Pango badge. The live pages publish exactly one number - $99/year to renew - while the intro…
A free, fast, one-tap encryption tool that is deliberately NOT an anonymity VPN - judge it as such. Cloudflare's own docs say the quiet part: WARP collects…
The security-community's default answer to 'how do I get my own VPN': Ansible scripts from Trail of Bits that build a WireGuard/IKEv2 server on a $5 VPS with…
Snowflake is a bridge, not a tool you 'use' the way you use a VPN: it is the Tor Project's pluggable transport that smuggles Tor connections past censors by…
This is Hola's model rebuilt honestly: PacketStream is a residential proxy marketplace where users are paid $0.10 per GB to let strangers' web-scraping traffic…
27 providers pass the combined filter. The independent hub explains the conglomerate map (Kape, Nord/Surfshark, Gen Digital) and why it matters[5]; the no-kyc hub maps the identity chain. This page is where both cuts intersect - and the result is four operators, which tells you something about the market.
Mullvad: independent, flat-priced, and the only operator whose architecture survived an actual raid with nothing to hand over[1][2]. IVPN: independent, Gibraltar-seated, annual audits, no email at signup. AirVPN: worker-run in spirit, deeply documented, crypto and vouchers, no personal data[6]. RiseupVPN: no accounts at all, donation-funded[3]. Different funding models, different tradeoffs, one common property: there is no holding company above them and no identity table below them[1][2][6]. The practical consequence: a legal demand has no corporate group to lean on and no user list to lean on them about - the raid record is what proved it rather than promised it[1].
The four pass the same two filters but arrive from different economies. Mullvad and IVPN live on flat subscriptions - their incentive is renewal without resentment, which is why the flat price and the audit cadence exist. AirVPN lives on a technically committed user base - the documentation depth and configurable clients are the product. Riseup lives on donations and political alignment[3] - capacity is best-effort by design. Three funding models, one shared property: no exit event, no growth target, nobody above to sell to. That is what "owned by nobody" buys - and what it cannot buy is infrastructure scale, which is why these operators win on trust and lose on server maps.
"Owned by nobody" is a corporate fact; it says nothing about logging behavior. The evidence ladder does - and this hub's four operators earn their places through it: Mullvad's court test, IVPN's audit cadence and canary, AirVPN's long technical record, Riseup's collective transparency. The intersection is necessary, not sufficient - the no-logs hub remains the verdict page. And ownership moves: re-check the ownership graph before any multi-year prepayment, because "nobody" is a current status, not a permanent one - two of the three conglomerates were assembled out of exactly such quiet acquisitions.
Two conditions at once - no conglomerate owner on record (the independent hub filter) AND no identity anchor at signup (strong anonymous signup: no email, or the account-number model). The intersection is small on purpose: 27 providers in our ranking pass both today.
Mullvad (raid-tested, account numbers, flat price), IVPN (Gibraltar, no email, audits), AirVPN (worker-run, Monero and vouchers, no personal data) and RiseupVPN (no accounts at all, donation-funded)[1][3]. Check the ownership graph before trusting any fourth party's claim about who owns them - including ours.
Independence removes the conflict of interest; anonymous signup removes the identity anchor. Together they mean a legal demand has no corporate group to pressure and no user list to pressure them about. Either condition alone still leaves a lever - an independent VPN with a users table can be leaned on user by user, and an accountless provider owned by a conglomerate inherits the group's incentives.
Everything. Subscription-funded independence (Mullvad, IVPN, AirVPN) aligns the operator with the subscriber; donation-funded collectivism (Riseup) aligns it with its mission[3]. Both are honest. The dishonest pattern is independence as a marketing story over hidden funding - which is why our scoring reads ownership and signup together with the evidence class, never alone.
It is the strongest ownership-and-identity posture a commercial product offers - and it still ends at the operator's own architecture. The raid record is what converts that posture into evidence[1]. For the strongest possible accountless model, the adjacent lane is the Tor network itself[6] - slower, but owned by nobody in the deepest sense.
Because independence alone was never the promise - it removes one conflict while the signup form still collects the anchor. This hub is the honest version of what "independent VPN" marketing implies. If you only need the ownership filter, use the independent hub; if you need the identity filter, use the no-kyc hub.