Proton VPN

Proton VPN (Proton AG, Geneva; born out of Proton Mail, which CERN scientists founded in 2014; the VPN launched 2017) is the privacy product with the cleanest ownership in the field. On 17 June 2024 the founders endowed the non-profit Proton Foundation with shares that make it the largest voting shareholder, so no change of control can happen without the foundation's consent. There is no private-equity owner and no advertising business behind it. It answers to Swiss law, outside the EU and the Five, Nine and Fourteen Eyes agreements; every legal order for VPN data from 2020 to 2025 was denied "due to lack of stored customer IP data", and Proton's transparency report lists 59 such orders in 2025 alone. The no-logs claim has been audited by Securitum every year since 2022, most recently in May 2026, with the reports published as PDFs, and all the apps are open source on GitHub.

The product is the full set: WireGuard and OpenVPN, the Stealth obfuscation protocol on every plan including Free, Secure Core multi-hop through Proton-owned servers in Switzerland, Iceland and Sweden, NetShield ad and tracker blocking, port forwarding on paid plans, a kill switch, split tunnelling, a Linux CLI, and 20,000-plus servers in 149 countries. Ten devices per account. Prices in GBP as shown to a UK visitor on 7 September 2026 (VAT basis not stated on the page): VPN Plus is £7.99 month-to-month, £3.59 a month on the one-year plan (£43.08) and £2.79 a month on the two-year plan (£66.96), and Proton prints the renewal next to it: "then renews at £67.08 every 12 months", so the second two years cost £134.16, a 100% step up. Proton Unlimited, which bundles Mail, Calendar, Drive and Pass, renews at the same £95.88 a year it started at. The free plan has no data cap. What the consumer plans do not have is a fixed IP or a device-to-device network: those live in Proton VPN for Business, where VPN Professional costs $9.99 per user a month plus at least one dedicated server at $39.99 a month. The server is the fixed IP (London is one of 31 cities), shared by the team, with SSO and SCIM. Support is a contact form, email and, on paid plans, live chat; hours are not stated. Trustpilot is the sore point: 2.2 on 983 invited reviews, 59% one-star, almost all about refunds refused after a missed cancellation, renewal billing and slow support. It is a small base for a company this size, but a consistent theme, and Proton's 30-day refund is once per user, direct purchases only.

First-party: Proton VPN has been our VPN for just over a year, across the team's devices, and it has been reliable and fast for us. We came to it after more than five years on NordVPN, and chose it for the jurisdiction, the ownership and the audit record as much as the app; the Proton Unlimited bundle means the same account covers mail, storage and passwords. Saaskly has an affiliate link for Proton VPN; the verdict came first and the link does not affect the score.