Mullvad Has No Free Plan. That Is the Product.
Every freemium VPN funds the free users somehow. Mullvad opted out of that arithmetic in 2009 and has not revisited it since. No trial either.
Mullvad has no free plan, no trial and no annual discount. It costs EUR 5 a month, the same price since 2009, for one tier with five devices, servers in 50 countries and WireGuard only since January 2026. Accounts are a randomly generated 16-digit number with no email address attached, and the refund window is 14 days.1
A directory of free tiers can either skip a service with no free tier or explain why the absence is the point. Mullvad is worth a report because its missing free plan is the product decision everything else follows from.
Free VPNs are paid for by someone: advertising, affiliate routing, resold bandwidth or a data business. Mullvad's answer, unchanged for seventeen years, is that the customer pays and nobody else does.
What EUR 5 actually buys
| Mullvad | |
|---|---|
| Price | EUR 5/month flat, no tiers |
| Free plan | None |
| Free trial | None, 14-day refund instead |
| Devices | 5 |
| Servers | 560+ in 50 countries |
| Protocol | WireGuard only |
| Account | 16-digit number, no email |
| Auto-renewal | No |
| Multihop | Included |
| DNS blocking | Included |
There is no annual plan, which is unusual and deliberate. Paying yearly is how VPN services lock in customers, and Mullvad has chosen not to offer the discount or the lock.
Payments are accepted by card, PayPal, bank transfer and cash by post. Cryptocurrency gets a 10% discount, which is the only variation on the price.
The account number is the whole signup
Mullvad generates a random 16-digit account number and asks for nothing else. No email, no name, no password. The number is the credential.
This is not a marketing claim layered on a normal account system. There is no personal data to hand over, which means there is nothing to disclose under a request, nothing to leak and nothing to sell.
The cost is that losing the number loses the account. There is no email recovery because there is no email. People screenshot it, print it, or keep it in a password manager, which is a small but real operational burden that no free tier prepares you for.
WireGuard only since January 2026
Mullvad retired OpenVPN at the start of 2026 and runs solely on WireGuard, with its own userspace implementation to reduce fingerprinting.
In practice this is fine on every modern platform, since WireGuard clients exist for all of them and Mullvad ships its own apps. It does matter if you have an old router running an OpenVPN client profile, because that configuration no longer connects.
The upside is speed and a smaller attack surface. WireGuard is materially faster than OpenVPN on the same hardware, and one protocol is easier to audit than two.
No free trial is unusual, and the refund is the substitute
Fourteen days, money back, no questions. The exception is cash payments, which cannot be refunded because there is no route back to the sender.
That is a worse experience than a free trial in one specific way: you pay first. It is a better one in every other way, because a trial is a funnel designed to convert and a refund window is not.
Practically, fourteen days is enough to test whether the servers near you perform well, which is the only thing you cannot learn from a review.
Five devices is the real limit
Five simultaneous devices on EUR 5. That is a phone, a laptop, a tablet, a desktop and one spare, with no per-device upsell beyond buying a second account.
Compare that with Proton's free bundle, which includes Proton VPN on a single device at no cost. Someone who wants a free VPN for one laptop has a genuine zero-cost option. Someone who wants five devices and no account details pays EUR 5 and gets a materially different product.
What the price does not include
No streaming-optimised servers, and no attempt to defeat streaming geo-blocks. Mullvad does not market itself for unblocking Netflix, and it behaves accordingly.
No dedicated IP addresses. Port forwarding is available but has been a moving target across 2025 and 2026, so check the current documentation before planning around it.
No live chat support. Email and a documentation base, on a paid product, which is thinner than the price suggests.
When it makes sense
You want a VPN where payment is the entire business model, and you are comfortable with five devices and no streaming tricks. Seventeen years at one price is the strongest stability signal in this category. Tailscale makes the opposite bet on the same problem, giving the product away and restricting it by licence instead of by price.
If a free tier is a requirement rather than a preference, Proton VPN has one with ten countries and unlimited data.
When it does not
You need a free option, in which case there is none and this report ends. You need twelve devices on one account. You need OpenVPN for legacy hardware. Or you need unblocking rather than privacy, which is a different product category entirely.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a Mullvad free trial?
No. Mullvad offers a 14-day money-back window instead, which does not apply to cash payments.
How much does Mullvad cost?
EUR 5 a month, flat, with no annual discount and no tiers. Paying in cryptocurrency takes 10% off.
Does Mullvad need an email address?
No. The account is a randomly generated 16-digit number, and there is no email recovery if it is lost.
How many devices can I use with Mullvad?
Five simultaneous devices on one account.
Does Mullvad still support OpenVPN?
No. OpenVPN was retired in January 2026 and Mullvad is WireGuard only.
Pricing, device limits, protocol support and refund terms verified against Mullvad's pricing page and documentation on 20 October 2026.
Sources
- Mullvad pricing: mullvad.net/en/pricing. Used for: Flat EUR 5 price, five-device limit and refund terms.
All sources are the vendor's own plan or documentation pages, checked on 20 October 2026. Plan terms change without notice, so confirm current limits before you rely on them.
