When you’re watching every dollar, subscriptions are normally the first thing removed from your monthly budget. If a subscription starts charging more after one year, you may be quick to unsubscribe. However, have you ever questioned why the product’s price suddenly increases after 12 months?

Take VPNs. A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel for your internet traffic. VPNs enhance privacy, secure public Wi-Fi connections, and bypass geoblocks. However, a VPN isn’t just another app. A global VPN network requires constant investment, maintenance, and security improvements. Besides encryption, there is a host of additional services that VPNs provide. Once considered, the price increase matches the value of the service.

A Global VPN Network Requires Constant Investment

VPNs are expensive to maintain. A premium VPN supports server networks across well over 100 countries.

For each country, the provider needs to cover the costs of:

• Data center leasing
• High-capacity bandwidth
• Hardware maintenance
• Hardware replacement
• 24/7 network monitoring
• Protection against outages and cyberattacks

Plus, moving a massive amount of encrypted data across borders costs high data and ISP (Internet Service Provider) transit costs.

These are never a one-time payment — they are ongoing and can be subject to high increases. To keep on top of payments, the service provider must charge you high monthly costs.

As a customer, your money isn’t necessarily going toward the company’s profit. It’s the price you’re required to pay for faster speeds, high-capacity bandwidth, and more location choices.

If you opt for a cheaper or free alternative, you limit the features you receive. For example, free VPN tiers normally only cover between 1 and 12 countries. Free VPNs also carry significantly higher privacy risks than paid alternatives. They don’t have the financial support to provide a secure global VPN network. So, they are less effective than ones that come with high monthly fees.

The Cost of Audits and Verification

On top of maintenance, the VPN provider needs to cover the cost of audits. Protecting customers isn’t enough — they need to hire professionals to test and verify public claims.

Independent third-party audits are not cheap. According to Techsy, an individual cybersecurity audit can cost between $5,000 and sometimes over $150,000. You can expect a VPN’s audits to be on the higher end of the price range.

Individual audits involve experienced security experts reviewing the company’s internal processes and technical controls. Audit timeframes can take between a few weeks and several months, depending on the scope of the audit. No-logs audits, for example, typically take a month. Deep source-code stress tests, on the other hand, can take several months.

A typical VPN provider will undergo an audit annually. Cheaper and free VPNs will receive audits less frequently. To cut costs, free VPNs may skip audits altogether. They also log customer data and run thinner service networks, which risks user safety.

The University of Michigan and the University of New Mexico recently conducted a study on free Android VPNs. The study concluded that 61 of the 281 tools they examined were transmitting data without encryption. These findings suggest that some VPNs are not only skipping audits, but failing to deliver basic VPN services.

The price that premium VPNs pay for audits is worth it, as they can prove what their marketing promises. It does, however, mean that customers need to pay more monthly to cover the cost of the audit.

Building Better VPN Technology Takes Years

To continually provide a premium service, VPNs need to continually improve. Research and development teams spend years refining protocols to boost speed and efficiency. With each new advancement comes new security issues.

Proprietary protocols are also an ongoing investment, requiring dedicated engineering teams to develop, test, and maintain. For example, WireGuard introduced a fast and straightforward protocol in 2017 to replace older and slower protocols like OpenVPN. It experienced widespread adoption between 2018 and 2020. To ensure successful adoption, VPN research and development teams were responsible for implementation and building privacy enhancements on top.

In other words, a VPN’s technology is never truly finished. Continuous development is essential to keep pace.

VPNs Offer More Than Just Encryption

VPNs combine multiple security and privacy features into a single subscription. Customers pay more, but they also receive more in terms of features and protection.

In addition to encryption, many leading tools now also come with privacy tools and next-gen antivirus. NordVPN, for example, supports these features and also has a global server infrastructure spanning more than 100 countries.

For users who’d otherwise stack three or four privacy tools, NordVPN’s all-in-one approach removes the friction of managing multiple subscriptions. By testing the app’s features through a VPN trial, you can assess its performance and usability before subscribing.

Unlike free alternatives, NordVPN does not track and store your browsing history, as proven by recent inspections. NordVPN’s no-logs policy has been independently verified through third-party audits, most recently by Deloitte.

The app also continually invests back into underlying technology. NordVPN’s proprietary NordLynx protocol, built on WireGuard, delivers high-speed connections without compromising on encryption standards.

VPN Pricing Reflects Infrastructure, Not Markup

When evaluating the price of a VPN, it’s helpful to consider what it is you’re actually paying for. When you pay for NordVPN, you’re supporting a service that depends on global infrastructure, cybersecurity engineers, and continuous software development.

VPNs need to fund the infrastructure that keeps users protected over time. They also need to periodically cover the cost of audits to prove their value. By examining only the monthly cost, you overlook the investment that makes the VPN useful in the first place.

You’re not only paying for the software you download, but also the systems working behind the scenes.