Mozilla VPN’s low price and commitment to privacy are great reasons to give this VPN a try.
Mozilla VPN, the new name for Mozilla’s Firefox Private Network, has left beta testing and is now available in United States, Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, Singapore and the United Kingdom. The company says there are ‘plans to expand to other countries this Fall.’
The service may have begun life as a browser extension, but Mozilla VPN is a full stand-alone product that offers system-wide protection for all your apps. As long as they’re running on Windows, Android or iOS, anyway. (The Mac and Linux builds are ‘coming soon’, and even the iOS build is currently in beta.)
The network is a modest 280+ servers in 40+ locations (9 in the US) across 31 countries, but that’s going to be enough for many, and there’s good news here, too. Mozilla VPN uses servers from the excellent Mullvad VPN, connects via the WireGuard protocol to deliver the best possible performance, and it’s P2P-friendly, too.
The feature set looks good, even at this early stage. A kill switch kicks in if the VPN drops, for instance, ensuring you won’t accidentally send important traffic over an unprotected connection. But if an app doesn’t need protection – it’s just playing a video or audio stream, say – then Mozilla VPN’s split tunneling can ensure it uses your regular connection, instead, perhaps improving speeds.
One potential catch is that although Mozilla VPN says it works with up to 5 devices, that means specific, registered devices. If you use the service on two mobiles, two laptops and a tablet, for instance, you can’t use it on a new device until you’ve removed support from one of the others.
(A handful of companies do something similar (KeepSolid VPN Unlimited is one), but providers like Windscribe, NordVPN, ExpressVPN and most of the rest of the industry limit you by simultaneous connections only. You can still only connect a set number of devices at one time, but the VPN doesn’t care which ones they are, and there’s none of the hassle of registering or removing a specific device.)
Prices start at a low $4.99 for monthly billing. And they end there, too, because Mozilla VPN has no other subscription options right now. That’s a pity, but we’re not going to complain too much when Mozilla’s monthly price is cheaper than some providers ask for an annual plan.
Mozilla only supports paying by card; no PayPal, Bitcoin or other options here.
Once you sign up, though, you’re protected by a 30-day money-back guarantee. And as you’d expect from a company like Mozilla, there are no sneaky catches in the small print (‘can’t apply if you’ve used more than xxMB’)’: if you’re unhappy, just tell the company within the first 30 days, and you’ll get a refund.
Mozilla sells its VPN partly as being from ‘a name you can trust’, and that’s a major plus. Even if you think Mozilla’s reputation comes largely from not being Google or Microsoft, it’s still way ahead of most VPNs in the trustworthiness stakes, and its partner, Mullvad, is one of the most privacy-focused providers around.
The Mozilla VPN website makes its general approach very clear – ‘Your privacy comes first’, ‘We don’t store your online activity logs on our servers’ – and the company provides more information in a brief Privacy Policy.
