10 years later I'm leaving

VPN
1

I’ve been a loyal customer for 10 years for PIA, but my subscription is up and I’ve decided to move on.

Good:

  • Fast, works well, etc. I was able to get 300-400 mbps consistently wired in

  • Dirt cheap price. Many other high quality VPNs cost significantly more.

  • Proved out to be no-log

  • Works in China: Despite everyone telling me to pay $9/month for Express and that’s the best VPN out there, PIA worked just fine. I even paid for 1 year of Express just to prove out the comparison and PIA worked. Everytime the CCP cracked down on VPNs where we’d lose access for a few days, PIA and Express would BOTH be down, and if you spent enough time trying to find servers, you could get both to work. So why pay triple or more for Express?

  • Despite what people say for support, they’ve been great and fast. I contacted them on the first day of my membership (mistyped my email), as well as more recently to get old receipts pulled up

Bad:

  • App and development seems to have seized up. I know many apologists here tell me if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but software is a moving train. New vulnerabilities in protocols are revealed all the time which is why you have monthly security patches on Android, Windows, etc. Even Apple pushes out updates on a frequent basis to address CVEs.

  • Wireguard on MacOS is still Beta and Mac in general is an afterthought (Edit: I mean M1 Native)

  • This community used to get a lot more support activity and it seems dead now.

  • Browser extension is a joke and has always been a joke.

  • Split tunneling is half broken still after so many years. I hardly use it, but I can’t help notice there’s a complaint every other day.

Personally I’m not completely against mind paying for PIA for another renewal, but there are other options out there worth trying. Given the downward trajectory of PIA, I feel it can’t be that bad to explore other options. I’ve decided to give Surfshark a run and see how that goes. If money weren’t an object I’d go for ProtonVPN given their company’s values, but they’re really just too pricey with only minor improvements to justify switching over.