Proton VPN, Windscribe and hide.me compared — which free VPNs are trustworthy, how much monthly data they include and what the caps cost you.
You tap a public Wi-Fi network at a cafe or airport and hesitate, because the last thing you want is to hand your traffic to whoever runs that hotspot. A VPN solves that particular problem — and then the question becomes which free one you can trust. Running servers costs real money, so many free services simply monetise the one asset they have: your browsing data, making a badly chosen VPN worse than no VPN at all. A small group instead uses the free plan as a gateway to a paid one, with policies anyone can inspect. The 3 apps in this guide are the ones with that transparent model — chosen for data allowances, independent audits and logging practices you can actually check, rather than the usual free-and-unlimited marketing.
Proton VPN is the only trustworthy free VPN with no data cap at all — open source, audited, ad-free, built by the Swiss Proton Mail team.
Proton VPN's free plan does what no competitor in this guide does: it sets no monthly data cap and shows no ads, a combination funded by paid upgrades rather than user data. The company is based in Switzerland and built by the team behind Proton Mail, with a strong privacy stance, publicly audited and open-source apps, and a server network spanning more than 140 countries for paying users. It is the obvious first install for anyone wanting a reliable VPN at zero cost. Free users get fewer servers and throttled speeds, serious streaming generally demands the premium tier, and the overall network is smaller than NordVPN's.
Windscribe offers the most generous trustworthy free tier — 10 GB monthly across around a dozen countries, no activity logs, plus ad and tracker blocking.
Among free VPNs with a verifiable business model, Windscribe's allowance is the headline: 10 GB per month with servers in roughly a dozen countries, no logs of your activity, and ways to raise the cap through one-off actions such as confirming an email. It also bundles an ad and tracker blocker, which most free competitors reserve for paying users. It is the strongest genuinely free choice for mixed daily use. Streaming video still burns through the cap fast, free-tier speeds trail the paid product, and unlocking the higher allowance requires handing over an email address.
hide.me gives you 10 GB a month with no account required and several locations to pick from, behind an independently audited no-logs policy.
hide.me stands out among free VPNs for something small but rare: you can start using it without signing up for an account at all, which keeps the personal data you hand over close to zero. Its no-logs policy has been audited by an external third party, the free allowance runs to 10 GB per month and you can choose between several server locations yourself rather than being assigned one. Those are generous terms for a product costing nothing. The cap is still tight for video streaming, the free server list is much shorter than a paid network's, and speeds vary noticeably at peak times.
Pros
No account needed for the free tier
Independently audited no-logs policy
10 GB of data every month, free
Cons
10 GB runs out quickly on video
Fewer servers than paid networks
Speeds vary at busy times
Download price only. In-app purchases and subscriptions may cost extra.
Questions & answers
Are free VPNs safe to use?
It depends entirely on the provider. Servers cost money, so when a VPN is free the customer is often the product: dubious apps have been caught selling browsing histories, injecting ads and even shipping malicious code. The 3 in this guide follow a legible model — the free plan feeds a paid one — and publish verifiable privacy policies. Outside well-known, audited names, scepticism is warranted.
Which free VPN has no data cap?
Proton VPN. Its free plan is the only one in this guide with no monthly data limit, in exchange for fewer server choices and lower speeds than its paid tier. That is why it is routinely recommended as the default free option, and its apps are open source on top, which lets anyone inspect the code rather than taking privacy claims on trust.
Can a free VPN unlock another country's streaming catalogue?
Rarely for long. Streaming platforms actively detect and block VPN traffic, and free IP ranges are the easiest to identify and the first to be cut off. Circumventing geographic restrictions also usually breaks the terms of the streaming service you pay for. Inside the EU you generally do not need a VPN anyway, since EU rules guarantee subscription portability while travelling between member states.
What is a VPN actually useful for?
Its most solid job is encrypting traffic on networks you do not control — hotel, airport or cafe Wi-Fi — while hiding your IP from the sites you visit and stopping your provider from seeing which pages you open. It does not make you anonymous: cookies, logged-in accounts and your browser fingerprint still identify you regardless of the tunnel, so treat it as protection on untrusted networks, not invisibility.
More related apps
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