Free Password Managers and VPNs Compared
Ten privacy tools. Which are genuinely free forever, which are open source, and where the limits fall on storage and devices.
Privacy free tiers are the most genuinely free on the site, because several of these tools are open source or nonprofit funded and have no paid tier to upsell you into. The limits are real but they are not commercial pressure.
This is the category where free is most often sufficient. If your requirement is a password manager or a VPN for personal use, the free tiers here are not crippled demos, and two of these tools have no paid edition at all.
All 10 reports in this category
- 1Password Has No Free Plan. The Trial Freezes.. Fourteen days, no card, full features. Then the account freezes rather than deleting itself, which is gentler than it sounds and stricter than most trials.
- Bitwarden Free Covers Everything Except the Codes. Free gets you the whole vault, every device and hardware-key 2FA. Premium adds three things people miss: built-in TOTP codes, file attachments and vault health reports.
- KeePassXC Gives Away What Bitwarden Charges For. The password manager that charges nothing also charges nothing for the features others put behind a subscription. What it costs instead is convenience.
- 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.
- Proton Drive Free Gives You 5GB and Nothing Broken. Five gigabytes of encrypted storage with no card and no expiry. The interesting question is not what Proton withholds, but how long 5GB lasts.
- Proton Mail Free Is 1GB and No IMAP. Here Is the Trade.. Encrypted mail cannot be read by a desktop client the way ordinary mail can, because the keys never leave your browser. That is the trade free Proton Mail makes.
- Proton Pass Free: Unlimited Passwords, Ten Aliases. Unlimited passwords across unlimited devices for nothing, and the aliases are the part no other free manager matches. Two vaults is where it starts to pinch.
- Proton VPN Free Has No Data Cap and One Device. Almost every free VPN meters your bandwidth. Proton meters your devices instead, and picks the country for you. That single swap changes who the plan suits.
- Signal Is Free Forever. Only Backup Storage Costs Money.. Signal gave away the entire product and charged for one thing: keeping your message history past 45 days. That is the whole pricing model of a nonprofit messenger.
- VeraCrypt Has No Free Plan Because It Has No Paid One. There is no pricing page because there is no price. The limits that matter in VeraCrypt are not quota limits but the consequences of getting it wrong.
How these were measured
Every report records the same fields: what the free plan includes, what it withholds, what the first paid tier costs, and the point at which paying starts to make sense. Figures are taken from the vendor's own pricing and documentation pages and carry the date they were checked. Plan terms change without notice, so treat each number as a dated snapshot.