VPN pricing without the intro-rate tricks
VPN marketing leads with 27-month teaser rates. Compared on honest steady-state prices, the cheapest credible VPNs run $2-6/month.
Updated 2026-10-29 · prices verified against official pages
The teaser-rate problem
VPNs advertise prices like $2.49/month that only exist inside a 27-month prepaid intro deal, then renew much higher. We store the honest numbers instead: the monthly-billed price and the real renewal rate. Monthly-billed, the big names cost real money — NordVPN $14.99, Surfshark $16.45, ExpressVPN about $8.33/month equivalent on its $99.95/year Basic renewal.
That reframing changes the ranking completely, which is exactly why vendors avoid it.
The honest cheap tier
Mullvad charges a flat €5/month (its own page puts that at $5.58) — same price monthly or yearly, forever, with no intro rate and no sales. IVPN Standard is $6/month or $60/year. Windscribe runs $9 monthly, $69/year, a free tier with 10GB a month, and a build-a-plan option at $1 per location with a $3 minimum. Private Internet Access is $11.95 billed monthly, or $47.88 a year ($3.99/month) — and unlike most, that yearly price is also what it renews at.
If you just need a trustworthy VPN and hate pricing games: Mullvad or IVPN. If you want the feature bundles (antivirus, alerts, identity tools), Surfshark One at $18.95 monthly is the comparison to run — and our capability matrix shows what each bundle actually contains.
Four more, priced the honest way
Proton VPN is the strongest newcomer to this comparison: VPN Plus is $9.99 billed monthly for 10 devices (the 2-year term advertises $3.49/month, billed $83.76 up front, then $83.88 a year), and Proton Free is a real free plan — 1 device, servers in 5 countries, no logs, no ads, no card. Proton Unlimited at $12.99 monthly bundles Mail, Drive, Pass and Calendar, which only makes sense if you would pay for those anyway.
PrivadoVPN runs the same two-tier shape: a free plan capped at 10GB every 30 days on 1 device, and a paid plan at $10.99 billed monthly with unlimited data and 10 connections; the $1.33 and $1.11 figures on its page are 12- and 24-month terms billed up front. CyberGhost is $12.99 billed monthly (the $2.19 headline is a 26-month term billed $56.94, then the regular rate), with a dedicated IP as a $5/month add-on. IPVanish is the dearest of the four on monthly billing — Essential $14.99, Complete $15.99 with antivirus, Advanced $17.99 with 1TB of cloud storage — but it is the one here with unlimited devices.
Against Surfshark Starter at $16.45 monthly, every one of these is cheaper on the same honest basis. What they give up is mostly bundle extras: Surfshark One's antivirus, alerts and identity tools are what the extra money buys, not the VPN itself.
Compared in this guide
Every claim above links back to computed comparisons with sourced, dated pricing.
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