What Are the Downsides of Proton VPN?

This page is part of the Proton VPN FAQ Hub.

Is it expensive compared to budget VPNs?

The most cited downsides of Proton VPN start with the bill. At full price it sits at the upper end of the market, and the cheapest providers will always undercut it, because they are selling a different thing: rented bandwidth with a logo on top. Proton is charging for audited infrastructure, Swiss salaries and a legal team, and all of that turns up on the invoice, as the full Proton VPN review sets out in detail.

Long commitments are where the price stops looking premium. Two years brings Proton VPN Plus down to a couple of pounds a month, which competes with anything credible in the category. Paying month to month is the expensive route, and that pricing gap is a deliberate design choice at every VPN company on earth, not a Proton quirk.

What is wrong with the free plan?

The free tier is generous by the standards of free VPNs, which mostly means it exists, has no data cap and does not sell your traffic to anyone. It is also, clearly, a shop window. One device, a short list of countries, and everything interesting held back for paying users, which is the whole of how the free plan compares with Plus.

For occasional use on a café network it does the job. As a daily driver the constraints start biting inside a week, usually the first time you try to connect a second device.

• One device at a time, so your phone and your laptop cannot both be connected
• A handful of free server countries rather than the full paid network
• No P2P support, so torrenting is off the table entirely
• No NetShield ad and tracker blocking
• No Secure Core, no Tor servers, and no access to the servers reserved for subscribers

Is the server network smaller than the big rivals?

This criticism has aged badly. Proton now lists over 20,000 servers across more than 190 locations in 140+ countries, which puts it level with the largest networks on raw count. The number means less than it looks, because most large VPN networks lease capacity from the same small pool of hosting companies, and Proton is no exception. Wikipedia’s entry on Proton VPN names providers such as M247 and Datacamp behind a large share of the estate.

What Proton does own, it hardens: bare metal machines with full disk encryption, run in-house for the Secure Core locations. A small network stopped being one of the downsides of Proton VPN years ago. The reasonable complaint now is that server count is a vanity metric across the whole industry and nobody should be buying on it.

Are the speeds a problem?

On nearby servers with WireGuard, connections routinely hold most of a gigabit line, so the speed cost of running Proton VPN is hard to notice. Distance is where it wobbles. Connect from Manchester to Sydney at peak time and the latency shows up in video calls and anything with a ping counter.

Secure Core deliberately routes through two servers, which roughly halves throughput in exchange for the extra protection. Fair trade if your threat model needs it, pointless tax if it does not, so leave it off by default. Streaming performance also varies by server and by day, which is true of every VPN and rarely admitted by any of them.

Which downsides of Proton VPN come from missing features?

No dedicated IP address. Proton’s own documentation on dedicated IPs puts static addresses on the business tiers only, priced per server per month on top of per user pricing, so a household subscriber cannot buy one at any price. If you need a stable IP for a work whitelist or a bank that panics at shared addresses, that is a genuine blocker rather than a niggle.

Support is ticket based rather than live chat, which is fine until something breaks at an awkward hour. The Linux app is properly maintained and open source, but it still tends to receive features after Windows and Android. Small things individually. They accumulate if you are the person filing the ticket.

Does Swiss jurisdiction solve everything?

Switzerland is a good place to run a privacy company. Outside the EU, outside the Five Eyes group, no mandatory data retention for VPN providers, and courts that want an actual legal basis before anything is handed over. All of that is real. None of it is magic.

Swiss companies still answer to Swiss courts. In 2021 Proton Mail was ordered by a Swiss court to log an account’s IP address after a foreign request arrived through the proper legal channels, and Proton complied, because ignoring a valid order is not a feature any provider can offer. VPN services sit under different obligations, and Proton’s transparency reporting is candid about all of it. Treat jurisdiction as a filter on who can compel data and how easily, not as an exemption.

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