Free or paid VPN: which one should you choose?

A free VPN has to make money somewhere: ads, tracking or a limited version. A paid VPN makes you pay for the service itself. Before choosing, ask six questions: who runs the servers, what is recorded, whether all your traffic goes through the tunnel, what it does with a dangerous site, what happens if the tunnel drops, and what it costs and how to cancel.

Is a free VPN dangerous?

Not necessarily. But a university study published in 2016 (Ikram et al., IMC conference) looked at 283 VPN apps for Android, collected from Google Play in September 2015. It found that:

→18% did not encrypt the tunnel, even though they promised anonymity and security;
→among the apps with a free service that claimed to protect privacy, 75% contained at least one tracking tool from another company;
→38% were flagged by at least one antivirus on VirusTotal, and 4% by more than five;
→two injected code into the pages people visited, for ads and tracking.

All 283 apps were free to install, but 153 of them charged for their service inside the app, usually through a subscription: so the study does not only cover free VPNs. It dates from 2016: it shows what to check, not the current state of each app.

What should you check before choosing a VPN?

→Who runs the servers? The VPN sees all your traffic: you move your trust from your internet provider to it.
→What is recorded, and for how long?
→Does all your traffic go through the tunnel? Some VPNs leak the requests for site names (DNS).
→What does it do with a dangerous site? Nothing, warn you, or stop it from opening.
→What happens if the tunnel drops? With a kill switch, the internet stops; without one, the connection continues without the VPN.
→How much does it cost, with or without a trial, and how do you cancel?

What does Trasimène's VPN do?

As of October 2026:

→19 countries: France, Germany, Netherlands, United Kingdom, Switzerland, Poland, Finland, United States, Canada, Brazil, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Indonesia, India, Qatar, Australia, South Africa. You choose the country.
→WireGuard, a modern VPN protocol.
→Servers hosted on Google Cloud and run by Trasimène, with no VPN provider in between.
→Unlimited data.
→Dangerous sites: inside the tunnel, Trasimène's DNS resolver compares the site names your phone asks for with its lists of phishing sites, malware and attackers' servers, updated every day, and reports in the app the dangerous sites contacted. It does not block them. Name resolution is handed to Quad9 (9.9.9.9), a Swiss service, which on its side screens out the malicious domains it knows. Neither of them blocks ads or trackers.

What does Trasimène record when you use the VPN?

Trasimène does not keep the list of sites you visit. It records:

→the history of your VPN connections: server used, address given to you inside the tunnel, connection and disconnection times;
→the amount of data sent and received, month by month, for 13 months;
→the dangerous or advertising sites your phone contacted, with how many times, for 48 hours;
→the names of non-existent sites your phone keeps calling (a possible sign of malware), only the most repeated ones, for 48 hours;
→figures about your connections (how many, which ports, how long) and about the shape of the names requested (their length, for example), with no address and no site name, for 48 hours at most.

Does Trasimène's VPN turn itself on?

Yes, if the option is on (it is by default):

→Android: it reconnects to the last country you chose when Trasimène's monitoring starts, if you subscribe and have accepted Android's VPN request;
→iPhone: it reconnects on every network, Wi-Fi or mobile data.

It does not choose based on the type of network: it does not turn on “only on public Wi-Fi”. On iPhone, if the tunnel drops, the connection continues without the VPN: there is no kill switch.

How much does it cost?

€3.99 a month or €39.99 a year, with no commitment and no free trial, and one device connected at a time per account. You can cancel at any time where you subscribed. Everything else in Trasimène is free.

Do you need a VPN all the time?

Not necessarily. Most sites already encrypt what you exchange (the HTTPS padlock). A VPN is mostly useful on a network you do not trust, and to hide from that network which sites you visit. On this topic, also read our articles “Three VPN myths that need to stop” and “Is the train station Wi-Fi really dangerous in 2026?”.

Free or paid, a VPN should be judged on facts: who runs it, what it keeps, what it encrypts, what it does with a dangerous site. Ask these questions of any VPN, ours included.

Sources

Trasimène: Mobile security

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