A lot of limitations!
Free VPNs set on purpose limits on everything. A data limit of a few 100 MB is nothing for normal surfing. You’ll probably be through it in a few minutes, and then you’ll have to wait a lot of days to get back to 500MB.
The only reason why providers do this is to tempt you to get a paid subscription. You will probably get frustrated with the limits and then you will think, “I’ll pay! Then at least I can use the service normally. Unfortunately, some services are already very intrusive from the moment you create an account.
Free VPNs make your connection very slow
Do you have fast internet at home? And do you use a free VPN? Then it may be that you connect to networks very slowly. That is not a problem from your home connection, but with the VPN. This is due to two things: the free VPN provider deliberately slows down the network so that you switch to a paid subscription, and there are also many users on the provider’s server. All those users together are actually too much to handle for the server. This brings clearly a very slow connection.
The solution: use a trial version
So, we mentioned before some good reasons not to use a free VPN, but we can name many more. Consider, for example, the large amount of annoying advertising within the provider’s program. On the other hand, paid providers do not show advertisements, do not slow the connection on purpose and are safer to use.
In order to choose the best option for you, we suggest you to first use a trial version of a VPN service. You can do this by taking a trial subscription. This way you can, for example, test for two weeks whether the network is good enough and whether this provider suits you. You will also not waste money on testing networks. Additionally, you will be able to surf the internet for free for two weeks through a good VPN. Do you like the provider? Then you can invest a few euros per month in a paid VPN; it is well worth it. Plus, you will be using the internet a lot safer.
Free VPN services leaked private data of 20 million users
The free VPN services SuperVPN and GeckoVPN have leaked private data of over 20 million users. This includes device information such as phone model, email addresses, geographic location, IMSI numbers, and login history. This is reported by security researcher Troy Hunt of data leak search engine “Have I Been Pwned”.
The data was stolen from the Top VPN services and then offered for sale on the internet. In addition to twenty million account records from SuperVPN and GeckoVPN, the dataset offered also contains a small number of records from the VPN service FlashVPN. According to Hunt, this suggests that the three free VPN providers use the same platform.
SuperVPN’s Android app has more than a hundred million installs, while GeckoVPN has been installed more than a million times. The more than 20 million stolen email addresses have been added to “Have I Been Pwned”. Via the search engine, users can check whether their data befalls in known data leaks. From the stolen e-mail addresses, 8 percent was already known to “Have I Been Pwned”, via another data breach. Therefore, this and the above reasons provide enough information not to deliberately choose a free VPN.