HMA, however, does not include many additional features. (Editors' Note: that IPVanish is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.)Ĭharging more than the average for a VPN is no great sin, provided the company can justify the expense.
Avira Phantom VPN, Ghostery Midnight, IPVanish VPN, Editors' Choice winner Surfshark VPN, and Windscribe VPN place no limit on the number of devices you can use at a time. Some companies are starting to do away with this restriction altogether. That's sure to cover even a device-heavy household. If you're willing to bump your subscription up to $95.88 per year, the number of simultaneous connections goes up to 10. Most VPN services we've reviewed offer at least five licenses without restriction, and HMA follows suit. Editors' Choice winners Mullvad and IVPN accept cash sent to their respective HQs, for an anonymous option. What you can't use are cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which are accepted by Private Internet Access, NordVPN, and many others. To buy an HMA subscription, you can use credit cards or PayPal. Both Mullvad VPN and TunnelBear VPN run about $60 a year, and Kaspersky Secure Connection is one of the cheapest VPNs, at $29.99 per year. Editors' Choice winner Mullvad VPN costs a mere 5 euros ($5.65 USD, at the time of this writing) per month.
Many VPNs come in well below the average we've seen for monthly and annual cost. As such, we're disappointed that HMA no longer offers the option for a monthly subscription. An annual plan might end up saving money, but not if it's a dud and you need to find a new product. We also recommend against starting out with a long-term subscription, because there's no way to know how a VPN will work for you until you try it. Just about every VPN offers a monthly subscription, and we use that figure to compare product pricing in an apples-to-apples fashion. HMA also offers a three-year plan for $143.64. But it's significantly higher up-front cost than the $10.05 average cost for a monthly subscription, which is what I use to compare VPNs. That's significantly less than the $69.10 average annual cost I've tracked across the industry.
In those regions, pricing starts at $59.88 per year. HMA does offer a monthly subscription option, but not in Australia, the UK, or the US. Keep in mind, however, that there are many ways for you to be tracked online and a VPN can only protect against some of them. A VPN also makes it harder for your activities to be tracked online by hiding your true IP address, and it prevents your Internet Service Provider (ISP) from gathering information about your online activities so it can sell anonymized user data to the highest bidder. This prevents anyone lurking on your local network from monitoring or intercepting your activity. When you activate a VPN, it creates an encrypted tunnel to protect your data as it passes from your computer to a server controlled by the VPN. Among our Editors' Choice winners, NordVPN and ProtonVPN pack in more features, even if they can't compare with HMA VPN's server options. Unfortunately, HMA still isn't transparent about its servers' locations, and the app lacks the privacy features we've come to expect from the best VPNs. HMA VPN (formerly Hide My Ass) boasts one of the best user experiences we've seen among VPNs, as well as an enormous collection of server locations, and unique tools, such as an IP address shuffler.