Mullvad
Mullvad is the least commercially interesting and most technically honest VPN on this list: one flat price of EUR 5/month whether you buy a month or ten years, no affiliate programme, no account email, and more than ten published audits including recurring infrastructure work by Cure53. Its real drawback is that it has deliberately given up the features most buyers want -- port forwarding is gone, OpenVPN was retired in January 2026, and streaming unblocking is unreliable enough that you should not buy it for that. If your reason for wanting a VPN is Netflix, buy something else.
Where it is strong
Anyone whose actual goal is privacy rather than geo-unblocking. Accounts are a randomly generated number with no email, no name and no payment link, and you can pay by mailing cash in an envelope.
Where it is weak
It is close to useless for streaming -- Netflix and Disney+ detection is inconsistent at best -- and Mullvad dropped both port forwarding (2023) and OpenVPN (January 2026), so torrenters and users on restrictive networks have lost features they relied on. Only 5 devices, and there is no discount for committing longer.
Sources: mullvad.net · mullvad.net · www.security.org