How it works
A fit score, not a top ten
The big VPN review sites are paid by the VPNs they review and rank them anyway. We are paid by some of them too. The difference is structural, not a promise: the ranking is a small piece of code, the affiliate terms sit in a block that code never reads, and every number on the site carries the day it was checked and the page it came from.
The five questions
Main job, how many devices, how you want to pay, must-haves, and where you’ll use it. Every answer is a chip, so the result is a URL you can share and we never have to guess what you meant.
Must-haves are hard filters
“Open source” removes every closed-source provider. “Outside the 5/9/14 Eyes” removes the US, Canada, Netherlands and Sweden. Your device count removes anyone with a cap below it. Filtered providers are listed under the picks with the exact reason, so a surprising absence is never a mystery.
The score, out of 100
Up to 40 points for the job (streaming test results, audit and ownership for privacy, P2P policy and port forwarding for torrenting, obfuscation for travel and blocked networks, speed for gaming). Up to 30 for price in the shape you chose: the two-year monthly equivalent, or the honest monthly rate. Up to 15 for where you are. Up to 10 for device headroom. A few for refund window and a free tier.
Three picks come out: best fit (highest score), best value (the cheapest within 15 points of the top), and most private (the strongest audit, ownership and payment story that still fits and is itself audited). If one of those would be a stretch, we show two.
Receipts
Every fact in the catalogue is stored with a checkedAt date and a source URL, and the cards print both. Where sources disagree (country counts are the usual one) the note says so. Prices were last checked 2026-10-11; intro offers change weekly, so confirm at checkout. The renewal price is shown next to the intro price everywhere, because that is the number that makes cheap not cheap.
How we are paid
Some provider links are affiliate links: if you buy after clicking one, the provider pays us a commission at no cost to you. Each button says whether it is one. Mullvad and Windscribe have no affiliate programme; we recommend them exactly as often as the score says. The affiliate terms for every provider are printed on its page, as documentation, and the scoring code has no access to them.
What we don't do
No checkout here, no coupon pop-ups, no countdown timers, no “deal ends tonight”. No accounts, no tracking beyond a count of which page sent a click where. We don’t test VPNs ourselves yet; the streaming and speed dots summarise named 2026 tests, linked on each page, and will be replaced by our own as we run them.