Many years ago I purchased a ‘Life-time’ subscription to Pure VPN. About an hour and a half after my purchase they were involved in something of a scandal when it was proven that they were not as secure as they may have been leading people to believe they were. I did the only thing I really could and went about my business, this time using Mullvad VPN instead.
Fast forward, literally six years and I stumble across a text fie where I had stored my old Pure VPN credentials. It occurred to me that I could save £5 a month by using it instead of Mullvad and surely by now, the fact that they were still in business proved that they were at the very least “okay”…. I guess.
I tried to log in to be told that my credentials were expired on my lifetime account.
I considered for a moment that given the expiry of my lifetime account, I was in fact, most likely… dead.
Once I got over my panic and realised that the very act of panic proved that I was most certainly not dead, I proceeded to draft an email asking “WTF DUDE!”
I eventually ended up in an email exchange with “something, something, stack commerce dot something”
They explained that the offer of a lifetime sub to Pure VPN was actually a big fat lie and issued me with a key/code/voucher for a lifetime account with KeepSolid VPN Unlimited. I made a sound of consideration and installed the client on my phone.
KeepSolid is a “”fine”” service that seems to want to offer me unlimited upgrade options in every direction possible. They can give me lifetime+ membership, my own server, my own IP my own DNS and will not ever stop telling me about services I do not want. Not eve! But alas, it was sort of free to me.
Here is the good.
- Actually a reasonable VPN service as far as I can tell.
- Seems to have no strange DNS leaks or RTC holes.
- Supports WireGuard
- Connects fast
- Has a Browser plugin, which is nice for a quick region change
- Has specific servers for torrenting, which I can live with
Here is the bad
- Specific servers for Streaming (which do not work)
- No split tunnelling on desktop PC (I know this can be done with other methods, but I don’t want to! Mullvad does this out the box)
- Endless upselling attempts in the client, plugin and via emails
I could live with all the other stuff. Except, split tunnelling is sort of important to me.
I want to stay connected on all devices all the time. What I do currently is have a secondary web browser that bypasses the VPN, the aforementioned split tunnelling for the purpose of TV streaming and game streaming.
Without Split tunnelling, I would find myself toggling things all the time and for the modest 5 monies I pay for Mullvad, it’s just not worth the effort to me to tinker with something that’s working perfectly.
Mullvad PN is great, works better than most I have tried, doesn’t have passwords to screw with. Has a good client for Linux, Android and Windows (maybe Mac, I don’t know) – also, as far as I can recall, has never had down time. It supports split tunnelling error free. I have no complaints, I was just trying to save some money.
The conclusion here is that I do not recommend paying for KeepSolid VPN. Mullvad exists and is a GREAT service that has everything I want.