About TierZero
TierZero exists to answer one question honestly: which free VPNs are actually safe? We vet free tiers on safety first, recommend the ones worth trusting, and name the red flags on the ones that aren't.
The free-VPN market is uniquely hostile to ordinary users. The apps that top the store charts are often the least trustworthy, the review sites with the biggest budgets are frequently owned by the VPNs they rank, and a genuinely good free option sits a few results down where nobody clicks. TierZero is built to cut through that: a single, plainly stated stance — safety before everything — applied to every free VPN we cover.
How we research
We do not run our own speed tests or publish measurements we did not take — a VPN's real speed depends on your location, server load and the day. Instead, every figure here comes from the provider's published pages, read and dated, and is cross-checked against dated reporting from independent outlets and against academic and security research where it exists. We treat a no-logs claim as unproven unless there is a dated, independent audit behind it. Where a number cannot be verified from a primary source, we say so in the text rather than guess. Prices are marked 'check current price' because VPN pricing changes constantly and is specific to your region and billing term.
Why we're independent
No provider pays for a ranking, a score, or a kind word. The clearest proof of that is what we recommend most: our top picks include free tiers and providers that pay us nothing — Windscribe, which shut down its affiliate programme, and Mullvad, which refuses to pay for reviews at all. If our advice were driven by commissions, those two would not be near the top. The rankings come out of the safety criteria plus each service's documented features, and the reasoning is printed so you can check it.
How we make money
Some outbound links are affiliate links; if you subscribe to a paid plan through one, the provider pays us a commission at no cost to you. We only ever route those links to providers we would recommend on the merits, and never to a free VPN flagged for selling data or carrying malware. Because our audience mostly wants free tools, affiliate income is a modest secondary layer, not the reason any recommendation exists. The itemised version is in our affiliate disclosure.
Corrections
VPN facts move — data caps change, audits are published, ownership shifts. If a figure here is out of date or a provider has changed its plan, we want to know. The contact page has the details, and every safety page is re-checked as providers change.