As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases — including a commission if you buy the NordVPN digital code linked further down. Nobody else here pays us anything: not ExpressVPN, Surfshark, Proton, Mullvad or Apple, and not NordVPN if you subscribe on its own site. Our top recommendation below earns us nothing. See our methodology.
Open any VPN’s pricing page today and you will see roughly the same number: $2.49, $2.99, $3.49 a month. Open the small print underneath and you will see a second number that is two to three times larger. That second number is what you will actually pay for most of the time you own the subscription.
Here is the whole article in one line: the advertised price is a 24-to-28-month introductory rate, and the renewal is the real price. Once you price the renewal in, five VPN services that look wildly different on the front page all land between about $5 and $7.50 a month.
What each one actually costs, from its own page
All figures below were read from each company’s own pricing page on 21 September 2026. Where a company publishes its renewal rate, it is quoted exactly; where it doesn’t, that’s noted rather than guessed.
| Service | Advertised | Intro term | Then renews at |
|---|---|---|---|
| NordVPN Basic | $3.49/mo | $94.23 for 27 months | $139.08/year |
| ExpressVPN Basic | $2.99/mo | $83.72 for 28 months | $99.95/year |
| Proton VPN Plus | $3.49/mo | $83.76 for 24 months | $83.88/year |
| Surfshark Starter | $2.49/mo | $67.23 for 27 months | not published |
| Mullvad | €5/mo | none — flat rate | €5/mo, forever |
| Proton VPN Free | $0 | — | $0 |
Two of those rows deserve a second look.
NordVPN’s third year costs more than its first 27 months. The intro deal is $94.23 total. The first renewal is $139.08. You pay more for twelve months in year three than you did for the two and a quarter years before it. Nord, to its credit, says so plainly on the page — the savings badge is explicitly labelled “intro vs. renewal prices.”
Surfshark won’t tell you the renewal price at all. Its pricing page carries an FAQ entry headed “How much does Surfshark cost after 2 years?” The answer, in full: you will be charged the applicable renewal price. That is not an answer. The only firm number Surfshark publishes is its month-to-month rate — $16.45 a month for Starter, $197.40 a year — and the crossed-out “old price” of $444.15 on the two-year deal is that monthly rate multiplied by 27 months.
The calculation that settles it: four years, not one
A VPN is not a thing people buy for 24 months and then stop. Run the arithmetic over four years — long enough for the intro rate to expire and the renewal to bite twice.
| Service | Cost through month 48 | Months bought | Real cost per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Proton VPN Plus | $83.76 + $83.88 + $83.88 = $251.52 | 48 | $5.24 |
| Mullvad | €5 × 48 = €240 | 48 | €5.00 |
| ExpressVPN Basic | $83.72 + $99.95 + $99.95 = $283.62 | 52 | $5.45 |
| NordVPN Basic | $94.23 + $139.08 + $139.08 = $372.39 | 51 | $7.30 |
| Surfshark Starter | $67.23 + two unknown renewals | 27 + ? | unknowable |
| Proton VPN Free | $0 | forever | $0 |
Mullvad’s own pricing page prints a conversion for readers outside the euro zone — €5 is equivalent to $5.74 at the rate shown there on 21 September 2026 — so treat €240 as roughly $276 and the monthly figure as roughly $5.74. That’s a conversion, not a price Mullvad charges in dollars, and it moves with the exchange rate.
Look at what happened to the rankings. Mullvad — which refuses to discount, has never run a sale, and charges the same €5 whether you buy one month or ten years — has the highest sticker price here and still comes out cheaper over four years than NordVPN, within 30 cents a month of ExpressVPN. The cheapest headline, Surfshark’s $2.49, produces a four-year figure nobody can compute.
It’s the same trick meal kits run with the first-box discount, whose unwind arithmetic we’ve shown before: a deep discount on a long first term, banking on you not re-checking the price when it renews.
Apply it to yourself in one step. Find the renewal price on the page — not the big number, the small one. Multiply by the years you’ll realistically keep it. Add the intro payment. Divide by the total months. If the answer is above about $5.74, you are paying more than Mullvad’s permanent flat rate, and you should know why.
Do you need one at all?
This is the question the pricing pages are designed to skip past, so answer it before the price matters.
The public Wi-Fi argument is mostly retired. It dates from an era when logging into your bank over café Wi-Fi meant sending a password in plain text. Browsers now flag unencrypted pages as “Not secure”, and the overwhelming majority of web traffic is encrypted before it reaches the network you’re sitting on. The coffee shop cannot read your email either way.
What a VPN actually does is move who can see you. Without one, your internet provider sees which sites you connect to. With one, it sees an encrypted tunnel and the VPN company sees the sites instead. That is worth money if — and only if — you trust the VPN company more than your ISP. All of them advertise a no-logs policy; none can prove a negative to you.
So there are three honest reasons to pay for one:
- You want your ISP out of your browsing history, and you’ve picked a provider whose ownership and audit history you’ve actually looked at.
- You need to appear to be somewhere else — travelling and wanting your home country’s streaming catalogue, or on a network that blocks things.
- You torrent.
If none of those describe you, the correct spend is zero.
And if you only browse in Safari, you may already have most of this. iCloud+ starts at $0.99 a month for 50GB — $11.88 a year — and every tier includes iCloud Private Relay, which hides your IP address and browsing from both your network provider and the sites you visit. Apple’s own support documentation is clear about the limit: Private Relay covers browsing in Safari, not other apps, and it won’t let you choose a country. It is not a VPN. But at a dollar a month, bundled with storage you probably already need, it covers the “stop my ISP profiling me” case for a lot of people. We priced the storage side of that against the alternatives in Google One vs iCloud+ vs Dropbox.
Proton VPN Free is the other zero-dollar option, and unlike most free VPNs it comes from a company with a paid business to protect. Proton’s own pricing page states the limits: one device at a time, medium speed, servers in 10 countries chosen randomly for you, no streaming and no ad blocking. For occasional use that is genuinely enough, and it costs nothing.
Where to buy, if you’re buying
Subscribe direct and you’ll pay the figures in the first table. NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark, Proton VPN and Mullvad all publish their plans without a login, which is more than most subscription categories manage.
There is one alternative route worth knowing about. Amazon sells NordVPN one-year digital codes, shipped and sold by Amazon.com Services LLC — confirmed on 21 September 2026: NordVPN Basic, 1 Year, 10 Devices. We don’t quote Amazon’s prices here; compare the listing yourself against NordVPN’s own figures above, and check whether the code you’re buying auto-renews or simply expires, because a code that expires is the one thing on this page immune to the renewal trap.
The verdict
Worth it if you have a specific job for it — a country to appear to be in, torrents to seed, or an ISP you’ve decided you don’t want profiling you. Then buy Proton VPN Plus at $83.88 a year on renewal, or Mullvad at a flat €5 a month if you’d rather never think about renewal pricing again. Those two are the only ones on this page whose fourth-year price is knowable today.
Worth it if you travel often enough that geo-blocked services are a recurring annoyance rather than a once-a-year one. Ten simultaneous devices on Proton VPN Plus covers a household.
Don’t buy one because of public Wi-Fi. That is the industry’s most-used sales line and the one with the least left in it. If a coffee shop is the reason you’re reaching for your card, put the card away.
Don’t buy one if you only browse in Safari and already pay for iCloud+. You have Private Relay. It’s not a full VPN, but it addresses the thing you were worried about, and you’re already paying for it.
And don’t buy the cheapest headline. Surfshark’s $2.49 is the lowest advertised rate on this page and the only one whose four-year cost cannot be calculated from published information. A price you can’t compute is not a cheap price — it’s a price you’ve agreed to find out later, which is exactly how subscriptions end up in the pile of things you meant to cancel and didn’t. If you do buy on a long intro term, put the renewal date in your calendar the same day, the way we’d suggest for any annual plan.
Prices verified 21 September 2026 at the source: nordvpn.com/pricing, expressvpn.com/order, surfshark.com/pricing, protonvpn.com/pricing, mullvad.net/en/pricing and apple.com/icloud. Surfshark’s renewal price is not published on its pricing page and is left blank rather than estimated. Mullvad’s dollar figures are conversions from the euro rate its own page displays. No Amazon price appears in this article. We analyse published pricing and terms; we don’t test software.