The VPN industry has a problem. For a significant number of people, their VPN subscription has quietly auto-renewed, jumped in price, or cost more than they initially bargained for.
The issue is so bad that multiple VPN providers — including ExpressVPN, NordVPN and Surfshark — have faced legal scrutiny over their auto-renewal practices.
This creates a dilemma for us at TechRadar when it comes to recommending VPNs. We are confident these are the best VPNs available — they are the fastest, most secure, and best at streaming — but it’s clear that more needs to be done to ensure fair and transparent billing.
To get a better understanding of people’s real-world experience using our top-rated VPNs, we analyzed almost 30,000 Android VPN reviews across the ‘Big 4’ — NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark & Proton VPN — published on the Play Store since the beginning of the year.
The results are stark. Across the entire Play Store dataset, people are mostly happy with the apps — just 35% of overall written comments are negative. But when we looked at billing and pricing specifically, that figure rose to almost 60%.
Read on to find out which provider performed the best, which you might want to be wary of, and the key practical steps to avoid common VPN issues.
This article is the first in a series investigating real-world customer experience of using major VPN services, inspired by our exclusive analysis of user-generated Android VPN reviews.
Which VPN has the most positive reviews?
The vast majority of written Android reviews offer little insight into how people really feel. There are thousands of generic entries like “top app,” “good,” “ok,” or “bad.”
However, once we filtered out the noise, billing and pricing issues emerged as a significant area of frustration, accounting for almost 30% of all categorized feedback.
Because total review counts varied widely between brands, we compared percentages rather than raw numbers. Attitudes were scored using a machine-learning model supported by manual human checks.
Read more about our methodology here.
When it comes to billing and price satisfaction, Proton VPN is the clear winner. Just 35% of billing-related comments were negative. However, that’s in large part because of the free tier it offers.
In fact, if you remove references to the product being ‘free,’ the rate of negative comments rises to 57%. While that points to significant underlying friction for paid accounts, it’s still better than the rest.
By contrast, the remaining market leaders face significant dissatisfaction:
- NordVPN: 83% negative billing sentiment
- ExpressVPN: 79% negative billing sentiment
- Surfshark: 71% negative billing sentiment
It wasn’t all bad news, though. There was some positive feedback, with one user praising Surfshark for its “outstanding value for money” and another calling NordVPN the “best affordable” VPN. But for the majority of reviewers, issues around free trials, auto-renewals and price hikes dominated.
Of course, all written reviews skew towards negative emotions as consumers seek to fix or change something. However, taken together they demonstrate a comprehensive picture with clear issues at play.
Free trials, auto-renewals, and price hikes
Across all of the reviews analyzed, three distinct issues appeared.
Firstly, it’s clear many people are experiencing issues with free trials. Specifically, people are signing up only to find themselves charged automatically.
As one Surfshark user wrote: “Wanted to try using the free trial, [it] didn’t work and still charged me for a month.” Meanwhile, a NordVPN user reported not being able to “cancel my free trial just days in.”
Another source of friction occurs when automatic renewals are triggered. And it impacts all of the providers mentioned. As one Proton VPN reviewer wrote: “A lot of users would appreciate more transparency before renewals happen.”
Closely related to the automated renewals are the price hikes that are associated with them. Even if you sign up for a certain price for a year, VPN providers often use more expensive rates at the point of renewing a user’s subscription.
One ExpressVPN user wrote: “Of course every time they renewed my subscription they used old prices and never told me about it.” Meanwhile, a Surfshark reviewer put it even more succinctly for others: “Beware of subscription auto renewal.”
VPN auto-renewal costs
Comparing the prices of 1-year VPN plans across the ‘big four’ initially and after renewal
| Product | Initial cost (USD) | Renewal cost (USD) |
|---|---|---|
| NordVPN | 53.88 | 139.08 |
| Surfshark | 50.85 | 79 |
| ExpressVPN | 74.85 | 99.95 |
| Proton VPN | 47.88 | 83.88 |
How to avoid VPN auto-renewal traps and surprise charges
It’s clear that major VPN providers need to do more to ensure fair and transparent pricing and billing. Thankfully, there are also a number of steps you can take to make sure you’re not unnecessarily impacted.
To avoid the billing and pricing issues referenced here:
- Turn off auto-renewal immediately after signing up: Navigate straight to your account dashboard after subscribing and turn off auto-renew.
- Prepare for the ‘early billing’ window: Many VPN providers trigger automatic renewal charges 7 to 14 days before your subscription technically expires. Set calendar reminders two weeks before your renewal date so you aren’t caught off guard.
- Keep an eye on your inbox: VPN providers will contact you to warn you about the auto-renewal and are likely to send you an email about extending your discounted rate around 60 days ahead of your contract expiring.
- Always request an official cancellation first: Submit an explicit cancellation request through the provider’s official account portal or support chat.
- Check refund terms: Many ‘free trials’ require upfront payment details and automatically convert into full recurring plans. Read the fine print before providing billing information, and remember that 30-day money-back guarantees often only apply to first-time purchases and are void during certain promotional offers.
What did the VPN companies say?
We contacted each VPN provider for comment on our findings.
Representatives from NordVPN, Surfshark and ExpressVPN highlighted their strong overall Google Play ratings and stressed that user feedback informs ongoing app development.
ExpressVPN added that subscriptions bought via Google Play are subject to Google’s payment and refund policies, but noted its focus is on making the experience “easier to understand, manage, and resolve when customers need help.”
A NordVPN spokesperson argued that its premium pricing reflects ongoing infrastructure investment, but pointed out that because the app is free to download, “some users expect the service itself to be free as well,” which can drive down review scores when users discover it is a paid product.
A Surfshark spokesperson acknowledged that “public reviews naturally tend to overrepresent moments of friction” but said its current approach is “resonating positively with users” overall.
Meanwhile, Proton VPN emphasized that its paid subscriptions fund an unlimited, ad-free tier for all users, adding that it “clearly states its pricing structure, upfront costs, and terms of renewal” without using tiered feature paywalls or surprise price increases.
Methodology
We collected almost 30,000 user reviews published on Google Play Store since the beginning of the year for the four VPN providers featured in this report using the google_play_scraper library.
As individual reviews often address multiple topics (e.g. streaming and security), we broke reviews down into sentence-level units. This expanded our analysis to over 47,000 entries, with reviews permitted to sit across multiple categories when required.
Each sentence was assigned to specific categories using regex keyword filtering, and analyzed for sentiment using a pre-trained BERT model that took into account the user’s star rating.
While all machine learning sentiment pipelines carry a margin of error, every VPN provider was subjected to the exact same pipeline to ensure consistency and fair comparison. Human review was also conducted throughout.
Data processing scripts were developed in Python with assistance from an LLM, and all outputs were manually reviewed.
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samuel.woodhams@futurenet.com (Samuel Woodhams)
