Recently I asked the ProtonVPN support if they provide “free trial”. In the first letter they answered - yes, which seemed strange to me because after registration, I have not received free trial and I wrote a second letter to the ProtonVPN support. In this letter they apologized to me for the misunderstanding and explained everything. Since I have not seen an official response from the company anywhere else (maybe I did not notice), I will enclose the answer of ProtonVPN support to me personally.
We removed the ProtonVPN free trial to prevent abuse from users who created multiple accounts to take advantage of our Plus servers and features. This consumed server bandwidth and impacted performance. Removing the free trial should increase the server performance and speeds for our legitimate paid users.
If you are unable to upgrade, we suggest using our free plan, which costs $0, offers the same level of security and privacy as our paid plans, and allows you to connect to servers in all regions of the world (the US, the Netherlands and Japan).
If you’d like to trial our paid features (such as secure streaming, higher connection speeds & access to servers in 50+ countries, P2P, Secure Core, among others) to test whether they fit your needs, please consider upgrading. All new subscriptions are covered by our 30-day money-back guarantee: Terms of Service | Proton This means that you can cancel your account within 30 days of the initial purchase, and we’ll refund you the unused days of your subscription.
As for the articles/welcome messages where the trial is mentioned, we will follow-up and update them accordingly.
I dunno about that though, using secure core must indeed add an extra layer of security don’t u think?! I can understand about them removing the trial though. Their free service is more than generous, just the fact that you can use openvpn to connect with is amazing and I havent seen anyone else got that implemented in their free account. Actually ProtonVPN is the only VPN service i can think of using as a “free account user”.
Thank you! this was needed. I was so confused at the lack of trial since i never used protonvpn before and everyone who recommend it mentioned the generous 7 day trial to test for myself
Yep tor is great and all but corporations really hate it and make your experience hell: countless human verification and outright blocking service (looking at you google/YT)
ProtonVPN free is a much more pleasant experience and works with all sites and is committed to privacy doesn’t keep logs or sell your data like other VPNs.
Honestly the free servers are unusable, they are always on 95% or higher load and can’t open any site with them, but can’t blame them for not having A+ free service. Personally I think they should invest in more and better paid service and remove the free tier
Hello I ain’t tech savvy. I just want to know how secure is the ProtonVPN free. Can someone would still know my IP address(?)
I want to try it first, my friend told me about it unluckily free trials ended. Would want to subscribe on VPN plus atleast. What is SECURE CORE VPN?
Note that Proton VPN still offers a Free plan: https://protonvpn.com/free-vpn . This thread is about a free trial for the paid plan, not the Free plan.
Proton is also hit with countless google verifications, and blocked from certain websites, so in a way it’s similar with Tor. But Tor is way harder to block, I had luck accessing certain webpages which are blocked access when using Proton, Tor worked just fine. The only downside for Tor is its infuriating slow speed.
I don’t have a strong opinion on whether to remove the free tier, but Proton has consistently opposed this decision because the free plan fits with their stated mission of enabling privacy access to everyone.
I’ve used both the free and paid plans and I agree that the free servers are generally sufficient. That being said, I find that free servers will occasionally become slow (still usable but may struggle with 1080p video, etc.) due to overloading.
Just checked it on my phone and it actually works well, not sure why it’s different on computer (Everything is normal without vpn and it’s connected with ethernet)
