What’s the catch with the free version of ProtonVPN?
There is a well-known saying that if it costs nothing, you are the product.
Can this also be applied to the VPN?
There are no ‘catches’. Proton offer a genuinely free service funded by its paying customers.
For free users, the limitations are the available servers, which are often heavily loaded, limiting internet speeds. Free users also don’t gain access to Plus plan features, such as P2P file sharing, global streaming, Secure Core and NetShield ad and malware blocking.
In terms of privacy and security, there are no catches at all.
Yes it definitely applies to VPNs, but for ProtonVPN the only catch is the limitations you have, like how many countries/servers/speed and other perks; no catch for privacy/security.
I used the free one for a while and it was great for my purposes. That’s why I chose proton when choosing a paid vpn.
Read ProtonVPNs no-log audit and you can see what things get monitored on the free servers compared to the paid ones:
https://protonvpn.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/securitum-protonvpn-nologs-20220330.pdf
Hint: They don’t log anything, just anonymously analyze traffic on the free ones to block P2P.
It’s not too fast and only have 3 counties to choose from.
The free Proton VPN servers use deep package inspection (nDPI) to block BitTorrent traffic which negatively affects their performance. Other than that, they keep no logs which keeps the privacy and security aspects intact.
Why doesn’t ProtonVPN let me whitelist torrent clients? If I can’t torrent via the free VPN servers that’s fine, but why does it have to prevent me from torrenting directly through my ISP while otherwise allowing me to stay connected to the VPN? The white list works fine with other programs so why not torrents?
What you’re asking for is split tunneling, which should be available in the client.
That’s what I’m using, the list in the Advanced tab of the Settings, but every time I’m trying to torrent something ProtonVPN starts yelling at me with warning popups in both the app itself and browser tabs then cuts off my connection as if I never whitelisted my torrent client. Maybe it doesn’t work specifically with qBittorrent for some reason? It’s the most popular one everyone is using so I doubt it. Tried rebooting the whole system and updating ProtonVPN to the newest version but it just refuses to see qBit in the white list even though the other apps and IPs are able to pass through so I know that the split tunneling itself works, just not for torrents.