Customers ask us fairly often whether they should be paying for a VPN. The honest answer is usually "probably not, and not for the reason the ad gave you."
What the ads are still selling
Most VPN marketing is built on a world that mostly went away. It describes coffee-shop Wi-Fi where a stranger can read your banking session out of the air, and it sells you an encrypted tunnel as the fix.
That threat was real once. Then nearly every site on the internet moved to HTTPS, which encrypts the connection between your browser and the site by itself, on any network, with no subscription. Someone sharing that coffee-shop Wi-Fi can see which sites you visited. They can't read your mail or your bank balance.
What a VPN actually does
A VPN moves the boundary of who can see that much. Instead of your local network and your ISP seeing which sites you connect to, the VPN provider sees it. That's the whole trade: you're not removing an observer, you're choosing a different one.
Whether that's an improvement depends entirely on how much you trust the new one. A VPN company whose entire business is privacy claims has a strong incentive to say the right things and no obligation to prove them.
Where a VPN is genuinely the right tool
- Reaching your own network remotely—a work VPN, or getting to files or cameras at home from elsewhere. This is what VPNs were invented for and they're excellent at it.
- Appearing to be somewhere else, for streaming region locks or testing how a site behaves from another country.
- Networks you truly don't trust, including ones that inject ads or redirect your DNS. Hotels are the classic offender.
- Keeping your browsing off your ISP's records, if that matters to you as a matter of principle. For the record, we don't log or sell customer browsing.
What it won't do
A VPN doesn't stop phishing, malware, or a scam text. It doesn't hide you from a site you're logged into—Google knows you're you regardless of where the connection appears to come from. And it can't make an unpatched router safe.
The takeaway: buy a VPN for remote access or a specific untrusted network, not for general safety. Your money does more good in a password manager, and your attention does more good on the fundamentals.