This Swedish VPN makes some big claims. Can it deliver?
While many VPN companies sell themselves on their ability to unblock every streaming platform on the planet, Swedish-based Anonine takes a more grown-up approach, claiming ‚Privacy & security is our top priority.‘
The company network is relatively small, with just 150 servers across 35 countries. But once you’re connected, the service more than covers the VPN basics: strong AES-256-CBC encryption, P2P-friendly,5 simultaneous connections, no limits on bandwidth or speed, and 24/7 support if anything goes wrong.
There’s OpenVPN, PPTP, SSTP and L2TP support, STunnel obfuscation to bypass VPN blocking, and WireGuard via third-party clients. Custom Windows, Mac iOS and Android apps are available, while web tutorials show how to configure Linux, routers and more.
More unusual extras include port forwarding support, and the ability to get a free public IP address for the Swedish location. Your IP won’t be protected by Anonine’s firewall, but it does mean you’re able to expose services on your system to the internet (run a server, say), and Anonine suggests it might ‚improve your experience‘ with P2P and online gaming.
Anonine’s pricing seems reasonable at €6.99 ($7.60) for a single month, and only €3.99 per month ($4.35) if you opt for a full year. There’s no trial or free plan that covers all platforms, but you can get three days free with the Android app, and the company offers some protection with a 7-day money-back guarantee.
Anonine’s privacy policy is lengthy, but relatively detailed, with multiple sections recording the data it stores, the reason each item is kept, and how long it’s retained.
The company mostly stores only the bare essentials necessary to run the service: email address, username, password, a basic payment history (IDs, amounts and dates, not account details).
Anonine does store the traffic used for each account, but only as a single figure, a total, not anything that could identify when you used the service.
Detailed session logging seems to be largely ruled out, as the policy says Anonine doesn’t record logs, connection timestamps or session durations, the locations or servers you select, IP addresses or DNS requests.
This all looks good to us, but as usual with smaller VPNs, there’s no way to know whether Anonine really is following these rules. Providers like TunnelBear, NordVPN and VyprVPN have put their systems through public audits to give more reassurance about what they’re doing, and hopefully, over time, Anonine and the rest of the industry will follow suit.
Signing up with Anonine is easy, with the company supporting payment types including card, PayPal, Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, and more.
An unusually capable web console has sections covering account information, download links, server details, troubleshooting and support, and these deliver way more than you might expect.
