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.