In 2017, we tried to find a trustworthy VPN review. Simple request, right? We typed "best VPN" into Google and found exactly what you'd expect: ten pages of beautifully designed review sites, all ranking the same five VPNs in slightly different orders, all with the same glowing praise, all with the same giant green "GET 83% OFF" buttons at the top.
Every single one of them was collecting affiliate commissions from the products they were "independently reviewing."
That's the VPN review industry in a nutshell. It's not journalism. It's a dressed-up coupon site.
Why Reviewing VPNs is Actually Hard
Here's the thing nobody talks about: reviewing VPNs is genuinely difficult in a way that reviewing, say, a graphics card is not.
If you want to review an RTX 5090, you buy it, run 3DMark, publish the frame rates. The numbers don't lie. The hardware either renders the game or it doesn't.
But a VPN's entire value proposition is trust. You're handing 100% of your internet traffic to a company and hoping they don't look at it, log it, sell it, or hand it to a government agency when asked nicely. How do you benchmark that? You can't just run a "trust score" synthetic test.
And yet, that's exactly what 99% of VPN reviews pretend to do. They test download speed (which tells you nothing about privacy), count server locations (which tells you nothing about logging), and then paste a five-star rating next to an affiliate link.
Our Three-Pillar Methodology
We built AnonyVPN around three things most review sites skip entirely.
1. Follow the Money
Who actually owns this VPN company? A lot of "competing" VPNs are owned by the same holding company. We trace ownership structures, check jurisdiction (where servers are legally located matters a lot), and flag anything that smells like a data broker with a pretty logo.
2. Verify the Math
Marketing says "Unbreakable Encryption." We check the actual protocol implementation — WireGuard vs OpenVPN, whether AES-256-GCM is actually in use, if perfect forward secrecy is enabled, and whether the kill switch actually works when you yank the ethernet cable mid-session.
3. Read the Law
Privacy policies are where companies can't lie without legal consequences. We read all of them. Every paragraph. We've found logging clauses buried in section 8.4.2 that completely contradict the "Zero Logs!" banner on the homepage. It's a fun hobby. Highly recommend.
What We Actually Do Before Publishing a Review
Before any VPN makes it onto our list, we do all of this ourselves — with money from our own pockets:
- Buy the subscription — no free review accounts, no "partner access." We pay retail like everyone else.
- Run DNS leak tests — using tools like dnsleaktest.com and ipleak.net while actively connected.
- Test the kill switch — deliberately drop the VPN connection mid-session and check if our real IP surfaces.
- Check WebRTC leaks — because a lot of VPNs that pass DNS tests still leak via WebRTC in browsers.
- Read the full privacy policy and terms of service — yes, actually, including the boring bits.
- Check audit history — has a third-party firm (Cure53, PwC, Deloitte) actually verified the no-logs claim?
- Research ownership — who owns this company, where are they incorporated, what's their legal history?
If a VPN fails any of these, it doesn't make our top 10. Simple as that.
Why We Use Affiliate Links (And Why That's Fine)
We do use affiliate links. When you click through to a VPN and buy a subscription, we earn a commission. We're not going to pretend otherwise.
But here's what's different about how we do it: the affiliate link goes on after the ranking is decided. We don't accept paid placements. We don't let VPN companies bump their position by paying us more. IPVanish is #1 because it scored highest in our testing — not because they offered us more money.
We've turned down partnership offers from VPN companies who wanted guaranteed top-5 placement. We've ranked VPNs that don't have affiliate programs at all (hi, Mullvad). The commission model works for us precisely because we refuse to let it corrupt the rankings.
If you ever spot something on this site that seems off — a ranking that doesn't match our own criteria, a claim without a source, a "fact" that looks suspiciously like marketing copy — email us at [email protected]. We take that seriously.
The Short Version
We're a small team that's been testing VPNs since 2017 because we couldn't find reviews we trusted. We test every VPN ourselves, we read the legal documents, we follow the money, and we don't sell rankings.
That's it. That's the whole thing.