The Best Free VPNs in 2026

A safe free VPN keeps three promises: it does not sell your traffic, it says plainly what the free tier caps, and the company publishes a real paid plan instead of running only on ads.

Most of the free apps in app stores fail at least one of those, so this list is limited to VPNs with a named company, a published privacy policy, and (in Proton's case) an outside audit.

Every plan here still trades something for the free price.

Proton and hide.me cap nothing but the server list; Windscribe, PrivadoVPN, TunnelBear and Hotspot Shield cap the gigabytes instead; Cloudflare WARP and Opera VPN are not trying to be a location-spoofing privacy VPN at all.

Toolradar data: the September 2026 VPN ranking evaluated 33 tools, and only a handful of them ship a free tier with no card required, which is the shortlist below.

How we ranked: eight VPNs, prices and data caps checked on each vendor's own pricing or free-plan page on 25 September 2026, in US dollars where the vendor publishes them, with no paid placement.

A free VPN is a virtual private network app you can run without paying, usually a stripped version of a paid product rather than a separate company. The free tier is the trial, the ad funnel, or (for Proton and hide.me) a deliberately unlimited plan meant to convert a share of users to the paid app later.

The limit is rarely the encryption.

It is the data cap, the device count, the server list, or the speed, and each vendor picks a different one to cut.

Reading which lever a given VPN pulls tells you whether the free plan fits daily browsing or only an occasional public Wi-Fi session.

A VPN that will not say what its free plan caps, or that has no separate business selling the paid app, is the one to skip.

Every product below publishes its limit and its company name. It also covers only network traffic, not your inbox, so our email security guide is the piece a VPN alone does not handle.

The gigabyte cap decides whether a free VPN survives a normal week. Windscribe and PrivadoVPN both give 10GB every 30 days once you confirm an email, which covers browsing and messaging but not much video. TunnelBear caps at 2GB a month, enough for a login on public Wi-Fi and little else.

Hotspot Shield's Basic plan caps at 500MB a day, which is roughly 15GB a month split into daily slices you cannot carry over.

Proton and hide.me cap the server list instead of the data: Proton Free rotates you across about ten countries with no manual pick, and hide.me Free holds you to eight fixed locations.

Proton's paid bundle also folds in the password manager we cover in our Proton Pass review, useful context if you are already inside that ecosystem for the VPN.

Neither throttles the gigabytes, so they suit anyone who streams or works over the VPN daily rather than only for a login.

Cloudflare WARP and Opera VPN are the two picks on this list that are not really privacy VPNs.

WARP encrypts your device's traffic to Cloudflare's edge but does not let a free user choose a country, so it will not unblock region-locked content.

Opera VPN only covers traffic inside the Opera browser, so anything outside it, another app, another browser, is unprotected.

Cyberpresso data: our security newsletter reaches 27,000 readers at a 28% open rate, from the audience file updated 20 September 2026, which is who keeps asking us whether a given free VPN is safe enough to run daily.

Figures below were checked on each vendor's own pricing or free-plan page on 25 September 2026, in US dollars where the vendor publishes them. Proton VPN Plus's cheapest confirmed rate is $4.49/mo on its 12-month plan, billed $53.88 for the first year then renewing at $83.88/yr; the standalone monthly rate is $9.99/mo.

TunnelBear's cheapest confirmed rate is $3.33/mo on its 3-year plan ($120 billed once), or $5.83/mo on the yearly plan billed $69.99/yr.

Windscribe's cheapest confirmed rate is billed as $69 for the year; paying month to month is $9/mo instead. hide.me's cheapest confirmed rate is $2.69/mo on its 26-month plan, billed as $69.99 every 26 months, against $11.99/mo billed monthly.

PrivadoVPN's cheapest confirmed rate is $1.11/mo on its 24-month plan, against $10.99/mo billed monthly.

Hotspot Shield Premium is $7.99/mo billed annually on the vendor's own plan page, which the page itself labels a 38% saving against its standard rate.

Cloudflare does not publish a WARP+ price on its own web page at all; that purchase happens inside the app.

None of the free tiers above required a credit card to activate, which is the baseline for calling a VPN genuinely free rather than a disguised trial.

Surfshark and NordVPN, both reviewed elsewhere on this site, sell a money-back guarantee window rather than a free plan, so they are not ranked here.