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Free VPN without logs: what to check before you install one

How free VPNs pay for themselves, five checks that separate a safe free plan from a risky one, and how Colitu's free plan works.

Written by: COLITU LIMITEDPublished: 3 min read

Running VPN servers costs money, so every free VPN pays for itself somehow. The question is how. A free plan can be an honest sample of a paid service, or the product can be you: your traffic, your browsing history or ads injected into the app.

How do free VPNs make money?

There are three common models:

  • Free tier of a paid service. The free plan has limits (traffic, devices or speed) and some users upgrade. This is the model that does not need your data.
  • Advertising and data. The app shows ads, sells "anonymised" browsing data or shares your bandwidth with other users. Several free VPN apps have been caught doing exactly this.
  • Unclear. No paid plan, no company behind it, no explanation. Treat this as the second model until proven otherwise.

Is a free VPN safe to use?

It can be, if it passes the checks below. A VPN sees everything you send through it, so a bad free VPN is worse than no VPN at all.

  1. A named company. Look for a legal entity, an address and a company number, not just a brand. You should know who can be held responsible.
  2. A specific logging policy. "No logs" alone means little. A good policy lists what is stored, for how long and why, including what is kept for quotas.
  3. Open-source apps. Published source code lets anyone check what the app does on your device: analytics, trackers, where it sends data.
  4. No third-party analytics. Analytics SDKs report what you do in the app to another company. A privacy tool should not contain them.
  5. A clear business model. If there is a paid plan, you know how the service is funded.

What are the usual limits of a free plan?

Free plans usually limit one of three things: monthly traffic, the number of devices, or speed and server choice. A traffic or device cap is the fairest kind: while you are within it, you get the same servers and protocols as paying users. Speed throttling and "free servers only" make the plan hard to judge, because you never see the real service.

Does a free VPN work on networks that block VPNs?

Often not. Many free VPNs use only OpenVPN or WireGuard, which are easy to recognise and block. Apps that also support VLESS Reality or Hysteria2 keep working on networks that filter classic VPN protocols. See VPN blocked by DPI for how this filtering works.

How does Colitu's free plan work?

  • Every account gets a monthly traffic allowance on one device, with no card. The current numbers are on the pricing page.
  • Every server location and every protocol is open to free accounts; there is no separate set of "free servers" and no slow-down. When the allowance is used up, access pauses until the 1st of the month.
  • The VPN servers do not record traffic content, visited sites, DNS queries or your IP address. Traffic volume per account is kept for 90 days for the quota, then only totals. The full list is in the security whitepaper.
  • The apps for Android, iOS, Windows and Linux are open source (GPL-3.0) and contain no ads and no third-party analytics, on the free plan too.
  • Colitu is run by COLITU LIMITED, a company registered in England (no. 17520342). Paid plans fund the service.

Which app should I install?

Pick your platform on the download page. On Android, read VPN for Android for the battery settings that keep the connection alive in the background.