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Don't let me ruin your good time, but my experience with Surf shark:
Used surf shark for about 3 years around pandemic timeframe. Had no complaints (other than it drained my phone battery super fast - didn't test empirically, but seemed somewhat worse than other VPN providers). I was unemployed for a while, so took the opportunity to cut expenses; tried to drop my surf shark subscription. It was a HUGE pain in the butt. I forget the process, but iirc, you had to use their help chat to get the number for cancellations, they kept me on hold for ~10 min, then had a long winded questionnaire ("were required to ask you these questions before proceeding") asking why I was quitting, then made an offer for discounted months before letting me unsubscribe.
Its my understanding regulations have changed such that that's not allowed anymore and also that most VPN can elations are about that bad anyway, but still, wanted to share my experience. Lol, suppose so long as you never quit, you won't have to deal with all that.
Ah, yeah, that sucks. In Europe you can always cancel by just not paying for a subscription, so I've rarely had experiences like this. Only time it happened to me was when I had been stupid enough to have a New York Times subscription (gah) and decided to end it. Huge pain in the ass.
With Surfshark I bought a two-year subscription without automatic renewal, so I get what I paid for and then it's done. But I'm sorry to hear about their bad business practices—it goes well with the overall sleazy look of their website. Hopefully I'll find something better by the time the subscription period is over. :)
Thanks for letting me know! I try to avoid any company that doesn't have open source software as the core of their business strategy, but with VPN that's a bit tricky.
do you have a more current preference/recommendation?
I suspect Mullvad would be a popular choice, but it's quite a bit more expensive. As I rarely use VPN (I hardly every do anything where it's necessary), I'm a bit on the stingy side personally.
Yeah, I had a boss once who's favorite saying was:
"You don't always get what you pay for
But you never get what you don't pay for"
Generally with software I will only pay for things that I get full access to without paying for them. I guess I would render your boss somewhat confused.
Well, he took it also to mean payment in the philosophical sense. He was also fond of saying "you can pay with your wallet or you can pay with your clock". He had some extension of that to the effect of its worse when you have to pay with both, but I forget the wording (it didn't flow well).
Not any authoritative recommendations. I'm at most a casual user of VPNs, and so long as I see the traffic getting encrypted, don't think about it much more.
I always hear Mullvad is great for maximizing privacy. Never tried them myself though.
Personally, I use Proton. I was prepping to jump ship earlier this year, but ultimately decided it wasn't worth it. I've had a pretty decent experience with them. The only issue was on on a Linux machine...Uh....and it was minor enough and long ago enough that I don't even remember what it was?
See above for my dissatisfying experience with Surf shark.
I did try to sign up with ExpressVPN many years ago. They're payment portal was busted (tried every day for a week, emailed support with no response).
That about sums up my experience.