What a VPN costs a year, and what it costs after the first term
Two of the five biggest names in this category will not tell you what you pay in year three. One has charged the same €5 a month since 2009. Here is the ledger, dated.
NordVPN
Apple's US App Store listing for the NordVPN app, after nordvpn.com refused our requests — read on 19 August 2026.
$99.99 a year · list price
Not published renewal price
- Billed
- $99.99/yr
- Renews at
- Not published
- Free tier
- Not verified — we could not read NordVPN's own site on the date we checked.
- Price read from
- Apple's US App Store listing for the NordVPN app, after nordvpn.com refused our requests
- Checked
- Vendor
- nordvpn.com
“Not published” means we did not find a renewal price stated by the vendor on the date we checked. It is not a claim that the price changes on renewal, and it is not a claim that it doesn’t.
This is the one record on the ledger we could not take from the vendor’s own site. Every request we made to NordVPN on 19 August 2026 — the pricing page, the plans page, the home page — came back HTTP 403. The robots file loaded; the pages did not.
So we priced it from a screen that does charge people: Apple’s US App Store listing for the NordVPN app, which sets out its in-app purchases. On that date the listing showed a twelve-month purchase at $99.99, described as the one-year plan at the best price, alongside a second twelve-month purchase at $83.99 and monthly purchases at $11.99 and $13.99.
We record the $99.99 because it is the first one listed. It is not the rate NordVPN advertises on its website, which is a two-year prepay quoted per month, and we make no claim about that rate because we did not read it. The renewal cell is empty for the same reason.
Where we have written about this
This is a price record, not a review. We do not rate the product, we track what it charges. The method is on how we check prices; mistakes end up in the corrections log.