ProtonVPN, Mullvad, and Editors' Choice winner IVPN accept cash mailed to their corporate HQs. Other services offer more privacy-friendly options. You can pay for a Hotspot Shield subscription by using a major credit card or PayPal. Mullvad, an Editors’ Choice winner, costs a mere €5 ($5.55 USD at the time of writing) per month, and a limited ProtonVPN account can be had for just $5 per month. Other standalone VPNs come in significantly less costly than Hotspot Shield. So, grab the short-term deal or free version and then upgrade if the service works well for you. You won't know whether a VPN will work for you until after you try it. We advise readers to avoid long-term subscriptions-at least at first. Again, that's pretty hefty compared to an average of about $71.93 among the services we've tested. The Premium subscription costs $95.88 per year and the Premium Family subscription costs $143.88 per year. You can also opt for a one-year subscription. The highest tier, called Premium Family, increases the number of simultaneous connections to 25 across five member accounts and costs $19.99 per month.Īt $12.99 per month, Hotspot Shield is significantly more expensive than the $10.05 per month average from among VPNs we have tested. It costs $12.99 per month and is the tier we used in testing. The Premium subscription offers five simultaneous connections, provides full access to Hotspot Shield's servers, and has no data limit. See below for more on the privacy implications of this practice.

Hotspot Shield also monetizes its free version on Android. That's extremely slow, even for mobile devices. Hotspot Shield takes the unusual measure of throttling free accounts to just 2Mbps.

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