What does that cost?
The answer is right in the article though…
In case he’s wondering, Proton VPN does offer a free tier, but it provides access to only a limited number of servers with less-than-optimal speeds. The company also offers a paid plan priced at $10 per month, which includes not just high-speed VPN connections but also Proton’s privacy-focused email service, 500GB of cloud storage, and other additional features.
Unlike with others, Proton, at least for some time and hopefully for the upcoming times, takes Free tiers as ‘demo versions’ to reel him in rather than another tier to exploit for profit. They have been like this before merging Mail and VPN and before introduction of Cloud storage.
Tru MVP on the market imho.
“what is free often proves most costly”.
In this case, it’s a loss leader. Think of it as a marketing expense. They pay a few bucks for a few servers that offer good privacy but limited speed and features. People try it out and are some of them upgrade to a paid plan, ideally more than recouping the cost of offering the free plan.
There’s a free VPN he uses that really good. He doesn’t post the name of it because he doesn’t want it to get locked down.
He would assume they are monitoring all of those free tier connections and selling the data accordingly.
What about NordVPN? Honest question.
IVPN is also a really good VPN. Open source, third party audited annually, and very transparent. They don’t do any advertising so they tend to be less well known.
The other thing about Kape is their connections to Mossad. It concerns me that someone with connections to a national intelligence agency is the head of a company attempting to obtain what seems to be all major players in the VPN market.
What about Firefox VPN?
Damn, he uses PIA. He missed the boat.