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.
Proton VPN
Vendor pricing page, protonvpn.com/pricing, and the public plan feed behind it — read on 23 August 2026.
$83.88 a year · list price
Also sold at $9.99/mo — $119.88 a year if you keep it for twelve months.
$83.88 a year · on renewal, per the vendor
- Billed
- $83.88/yr
- Renews at
- Same — $83.88/yr
- Free tier
- Yes — Proton Free: one device at a time, servers in ten countries, no card required.
- Price read from
- Vendor pricing page, protonvpn.com/pricing, and the public plan feed behind it
- Checked
- Vendor
- protonvpn.com
Proton VPN Plus is $83.88 for twelve months ($6.99 a month), $9.99 if you pay month to month, or $119.76 for twenty-four months, which works out at $59.88 a year and is the cheapest way to run it.
The interesting part is what is missing. Proton’s pricing page draws its figures from a public plan feed that carries two numbers for every term: the price currently offered and the standard price. On 23 August 2026 they were identical at every term length, and the promotional offers list was empty. The page’s own renewal sentence takes the form “billed at X for the first period, then renews at Y” — and here X and Y are the same number.
So the twelve-month price is also the thirteenth-month price. That is unusual in this category and it is the reason Proton VPN sits where it does on our ledger.
Proton Free exists underneath it: one device, servers in ten countries, no card.
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.