I don't trust any free VPN. You can install vpn yourself (for example using opensource outline). There are many choice, AWS, Google cloud, Vultr, digitalocean ...

I say this a lot, but running your own VPN service loses almost all the privacy. This is something people don't bring up when they recommend doing it.

With a paid VPN service, part of the attraction is that you're one of quite a few users on any given server at any given time.

Edit: If your only goal is to get past stuff that's blocked, that's different. Though if you get a VPS, you're still using an IP in a range that's likely to be blocked if a service doesn't want VPN traffic.

If a provider is offering free and paid plans, free plan is usually used to attract customers to try your service. The free plan is "paid off" with money that would otherwise go to marketing.

Mullvad offers unlimited 3-hour trial accounts. A few days messing around with that was enough for me to decide become a lifetime customer.

That's the correct model for onboarding with free services, not offering a free service tier with restricted speeds.

It's simply stupid as a user to forward all of your traffic to another company for free. Thus any VPN that offers such a service does not believe in fully educating its users of the dangers involved in using a VPN, and are operating at an ethical boundary.

I feel like I could theoretically just spend an hour writing a script to abuse acquiring the apparently unlimited Mullvad trial accounts, and just post it on GitHub. Sounds like a business problem.

You can't be suggesting that the first time someone attempts to do something like this on a large scale, that Mullvad's team would be surprised.

You surely can't be suggesting that this didn't come up in meetings, and that the opportunity cost wasn't determined and taken into account when offering this trial service.

The painlessness of the service, along with the encouragement to generate as many new account numbers as needed while testing, along with allowing full feature access without throttling, meant that I generated two weeks' worth of trials before finally deciding Mullvad was right for me.

But now I know they are right for me, and as I said in an earlier post I am now a customer for life. As long as nothing changes, that will remain so, and I will, as I am now, frequently proselytize their service and encourage others to try them out for free. I'd say they calculated the opportunity cost correctly.

I'm not suggesting that they didn't think of it or that it would be surprising, I'm suggesting that if it were to be abused, it could downgrade the experience of paid users until they noticed and fixed the situation. I just believe that VPNs which offer only some servers to free users or limit bandwith have a good model.

My experience isn't downgraded, it's currently limited by my home bandwidth. So again, it seems like they called it right.

There is usually a free version and a paid version for better speed.

You could extend the argument on price though.

You can easily pay an ISP $50/mo for broadband, so why should you trust a paid VPN that will handle all your traffic for only $5-8/mo on top? Is the difference all infrastructural costs? What about those cheap $3/mo VPNs? Where do you draw the line?

I presume the majority of that difference is because there's a healthy market for VPNs with practically no barrier to entry, whereas your ISP is a monopoly usually, or a duopoly if you're lucky.

Not outside the US. E.g., in our apartment, we can subscribe to fiber, cable, and DSL. On fiber and DSL, there are many ISPs to pick from. However, the prices are still similar to the US (you just get a lot more bandwidth for the same price).

I think it is more that the costs of running an ISP are much higher, you do not only need peering, but the networks including the last mile need to be put in the ground and maintained. Plus, in to some extend, people in areas with high-density populations subsidize expansion into lower-density areas.

The VPN market is really different. In principle anyone could start a VPN using just a VPS (it wouldn't be the best, but many VPNs are terrible anyway).

I'm pretty sure you and GP are saying the exact same thing.

Then it's not the same price.

I assume that the VPNs buy bulk bandwidth, and also they have to compete with each other, whereas the ISPs have to run (or lease) the actual lines to my home.

I don't know if there is a good place to draw the line... but free sure is in the "hey no reason to trust this in any way" zone for me.