Last month, I spent $671 buying subscriptions to 11 of the most popular commercial VPNs on
the market on the same day, using a fake persona so there wouldn’t be any hint
of favorable treatment. Why? I wanted to know if there really was
much of a difference between these VPN companies. And do they honor their money back guarantees if I
request a refund? Well, not surprisingly, there are quite a few differences worth noting and,
perhaps a little surprisingly, two of them did not give me the promised refund.
Hey there, this is All Things Secured, and I’m Josh. I’ve been using VPNs for almost two decades
now, and although I have ones I use and recommend more often than others, the beauty of this test
is that I can’t really inject my opinion here. Which is kind of embarrassing because one of
the VPNs I have reviewed and recommended in the past was also one that didn’t give me a refund.
Ouch. So to be clear, this isn’t a VPN review. This is a direct VPN comparison.
Let’s start with the signup process. VPNs do a really good job of confusing us with
pricing because they want you to buy 2-year and 3-year subscriptions and they don’t really want
you to be able to make direct comparisons to their competitors. To make this apples to apples though,
I opted for a 1-year subscription with every VPN, even if it wasn’t the best deal,
and to my surprise the pricing was all over the board. The lowest priced VPN including any
taxes was PureVPN at $38.95 and the highest was VyprVPN which hit my bank account for $108.25.
Yes, you can save some money when you buy a multi-year subscription, but
based on this sample of VPN companies, you should expect to pay an average of
$50 to $60 per year on a quality VPN service.
Beyond the amount you pay, though, you need to understand what you’re subscribing
to. Every single VPN service I purchased except one, required that I sign up for auto-renewal,
which means that unless I go deep into my settings to turn it off, each of these VPNs
will automatically charge my payment method to renew the subscription without asking me first.
IPVanish was nice enough to make me check a box to let me know this was happening - I
didn’t have a choice, I had to check it, but the rest of them just did it automatically.
Except IVPN. IVPN was the only VPN that had automatic renewal
off by default and gave me the choice to opt into it. That’s really the way they should all do it,
but they won’t because these companies make a lot of money off of auto-renewal.
A little side note here - this auto-renewal isn’t applicable if you pay using cryptocurrencies or
cash, and if you want a bit more privacy, these are the VPN companies I tested that
offered non-identifiable forms of payment as an option at checkout.
Speaking of my identity, what kind of information did I have to give over
in order to create an account with each of these services?
All of the VPNs I tested, except again for IVPN, required an email account,
but honestly, creating a burner email account isn’t that hard.
Strangely, IPVanish was the only one that asked for my full home address on signup. Why are
you guys doing that? I don’t see any value for them beyond collecting more of my data.
But again, I was able to give them a fake address without any problem, so whatever.
Another quick side note that I learned here,
this time about your email address - keep in mind that the address you use to sign up for a VPN
is almost always added to their company’s marketing database. Over the past month,
I have received no fewer than 5 marketing emails from PureVPN, which includes a newsletter I never
asked for and an unsolicited referral link that I could give to my friends and family if I wanted.
No thank you.
Even now, weeks after canceling all of these accounts, I still
receive marketing emails from Nord who keep asking if I want to renew again.
The moral of the story here - I don’t care which VPN you decide to purchase,
I highly recommend using something other than your personal email account. Create a
fake account, create an alias - whatever it takes, just don’t give them your actual address!
The next test I performed on all eleven of these VPN companies was a simple
installation test. How long would it take me after I purchased the VPN
to download the software and get connected to one of their servers.
The fastest in this regard was ExpressVPN, which took only 50 seconds, with the longest being
VyprVPN, which clocked in at over 3 minutes. Most of them have this whole process streamlined at
a little over a minute, as you can see, so other than the one outlier, they’re all pretty similar.
Each VPN has its own array of features that make them slightly unique, which I won’t go
into great detail here. But you can be sure that they all claim to have the most servers,
the fastest servers, highest military-grade encryption, blah, blah, blah.
But in my experience, at this point the industry has matured to a point that I
think they’re all offering pretty much the same product but using different packaging.
Ok, all of this is fine and good, but one thing every VPN promises is
some sort of money-back guarantee. And I waited the full month, all 30 days before requesting
the refund for each of these services. And then I timed them to see how fast and easy it would be.
Or, in some cases, how slow and hard. For example, NordVPN blew me away by providing
the fastest and easiest refund process. I went on their website, I logged into my account, I made
the request, and received confirmation of a refund in 2 minutes and 20 seconds. Not bad. ExpressVPN,
Surfshark, Private Internet Access and IP Vanish weren’t far behind and each of them allowed me
to cancel and get a full refund by simply making a request on the website via live chat support.
And that should be the standard, don’t you think?
We should be able to log into our accounts and cancel the service whenever we please,
either with the click of a link or at worst when talking to a live help agent.
And yet, many other VPN services make it so hard. ProtonVPN, VyprVPN, PureVPN, WeVPN, Windscribe and
IVPN all required me to send in a support ticket. So we’re talking about spending a few minutes with
an agent on live chat, then waiting for hours or a day before getting any kind of email response.
Now, to IVPNs credit, the refund email was issued within 8 minutes.
For the rest of these guys, though, it was a bit more painful.
The frustrating part of each of the rest of these VPN services is that they all required
me to confirm my cancel request twice. What this means is that I sent in a support ticket
clearly stating that I wanted to cancel my account and get a full refund, and instead
of honoring my request, they each asked me to confirm again via email if I wanted to cancel.
Yes, I already clearly said that.
Why is that a problem? Well, in the case of ProtonVPN, if I didn’t confirm my cancellation
request within the 30 days, even though I sent in my initial cancellation request within 30 days,
they wouldn’t give me a refund. Here’s the redeeming thing about Proton. In my email
exchange with customer support, they shared with me that Proton has zero access to user accounts.
So whereas all these other VPNs were able to log in and cancel my account for me,
Proton is saying that they’ve designed their system to be zero-access so that
even their customer support reps can’t cancel the account if they wanted to. Sadly, despite
starting this conversation with customer support prior to the 30 day period, it ended after the 30
day guarantee period and they would not honor a refund. I like Proton, I do, but that’s a shame.
In the case of PureVPN, their email support ticket landed directly in my spam folder,
which I didn’t find out until the week after the 30 days had passed. In this case, though,
when I did find the email and reach out to them, they still honored their money back guarantee.
And finally, Windscribe caught me off guard because they were the only one of this bunch
NOT to offer a 30 or 31 day money back guarantee.
Theirs is only 3 days long. So I guess shame on me for not seeing that sooner, but also,
what gives guys? Are you that much better that you don’t think that 31 days is a fair trial period?
Anyway, so after a month purchasing, using and getting a refund on 11 different VPNs,
what are the key takaways that you can learn?
First, if you’re really looking for privacy in a VPN, then IVPN was the only one of the bunch
that didn’t require my email and allowed for non-identifiable payment methods.
Second, if you do have to give over an email address to purchase a VPN,
don’t give them your actual email address. Use a burner account or an alias.
Third, if you’re spending more than $60 on a VPN,
you’re above average. I’m not saying it’s a bad purchase - heck, I use and love streaming
content with ExpressVPN which costs me $99, but recognize that it’s more than you have to.
Finally, don’t get caught up in all the marketing mumbo jumbo on a VPNs website.
There’s a lot of what they’re saying that’s just fancy words and other parts
that I think border on malicious deception. I’ve already done a video on that before,
though, so if you want to know what I’m talking about, watch that next.
I’ll link to all of the VPNs below, which in most cases are
affiliate links that help to support this channel. If you’d rather, though,
you can simply like and share this video if it’s been helpful. Take care!