Proton VPN Is 70% Off for Black Friday

Nearly half of Americans are using a virtual private network (VPN). If you’re not one of ’em, then what are you waiting for? VPNs protect your privacy online by making it far harder for data thieves, snoops, scammers, and hackers to track your activity.

They do so by acting as a middleman. Entrusting your digital privacy to such a service means having to pick a reputable, trustworthy service. As a digital security journalist, I’m skeptical by default. Most VPNs, I don’t trust.

I’ve used Proton, though, and I’ve looked into its practices. That makes it one of the few I recommend. Normally $10 a month, Proton VPN is 70% for Black Friday. That’s only $3 per month. That’s silly cheap.

why you’d want to pay

Yes, yes. I know I’ve laid a flashy crown atop the head of Proton VPN by calling it the best free VPN in the known universe, and possibly in parts of the unknown universe and other parallel universes, too.

I stand by that. The free version of Proton is one of the very few free VPNs I’d touch with a 40-foot stick. There are no ads, Proton keeps no logs of your activity while using its VPN servers, and it’s located in Switzerland, which isn’t a party to the various security alliances that “share” citizens’ internet data between countries.

Proton also regularly opens itself up to audits by independent third parties to verify that it doesn’t sell out its customers’ data or share usage history with anybody—governmental, commercial, or otherwise.

The free version of Proton VPN, though, doesn’t let you choose which server you connect to, or even which country. You can only connect to whichever server happens to offer the fastest connection at the moment. From New York City, I was surprised that the fastest server open to me was located in the Netherlands.

Springing for the premium version allows you to choose which server you connect to, including which country. There are 16,822 servers available to choose from on the premium plan, up from the 11,802 I counted when I last checked in February 2025.

It seems Proton has been busy this year. Check out more details on how I used Proton, both free and premium plans, in my review from earlier this year.