This VPN is offering five years for the price of one - but is it worth it?

Deals
By published

A bargain? Or are there better options?

VPN app on a smartphone
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
Jump to:

When it comes to the best VPNs, subscription plans tend to cap out at two years. But if you want to box off your data privacy for a longer period of time then this latest VPN deal might be tempting, with a five-year subscription at a serious discount.

Five years of VPN access for just $40 sounds like an excellent deal. It's less than the cost of one year of a NordVPN subscription and even undercuts affordable VPNs like Surfshark. But is AdGuard VPN actually worth your money, and is there an even better deal to be found? 

AdGuard VPN: 5 years for $39.97

AdGuard VPN: 5 years for $39.97
Save 88% on a 5-year subscription to this VPN. AdGuard isn't a leading VPN in our book but it is a solid performer with reasonable speeds. In our tests, it managed to unblock Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and Disney+ from the US but struggled with the likes of Prime Video and Peacock. 

View Deal

Is AdGuard VPN good?

In truth, AdGuard is not one of the best VPNs on the market. We gave it two and a half stars in our AdGuard VPN review and that's reflective of its place in the middle of the VPN pack. 

The positives are that it features several similarities with some of our highest-rated providers including split tunnelling capabilities, secure 256-AES encryption and a kill switch. This makes it an effective shield from public Wi-Fi.

However, that's where we start to cool on AdGuard VPN. In our tests its streaming performance was mixed. AdGuard managed to unblock Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and Disney+ from the US but struggled with the likes of Prime Video and Peacock. So look elsewhere for a streaming VPN.

On a security level, we are also concerned by AdGuard. It hasn't had its VPN protocol and no-logs policy audited by an independent third party. What we do know is that it doesn't use a traditional VPN tunnel, and makes use of an encrypted HTTPS connection instead. AdGuard is based in Cyprus these days, but it was initially created in Russia. To be frank, this does bring with it some inherent security and privacy concerns. Our reviewer couldn't find any links to Russian surveillance in their testing, but you can never be 100% sure. 

Finally, the concept of staying with any single provider for five years is a bit daunting. Who's to say where the market will be in five years, let alone what state a significant but still smaller provider like AdGuard will be doing in 2029? 

Are there any better deals?

VPN sales aren't normally quite as dramatic as 88% off but if you are looking for a proven excellent VPN at a top price then our number one pick would be Surfshark. It's not $40 for five years level cheap, but it is much better value than competitors like NordVPN and ExpressVPN. Surfshark boasts industry-leading speeds, unlimited simultaneous connections and top-tier streaming performance. 

If the $40 price point is as high as you'll go for a VPN then there is an interesting alternative. Fastest VPN isn't one of our top choices right now (it is getting better all the time) but it is offering a lifetime subscription to its VPN service for $40. Given the choice of the two, that's the deal we'd go for. 

FastestVPN Lifetime subscription: $40

FastestVPN Lifetime subscription: $40
Get a lifetime subscription to a VPN for one payment. Fastest VPN isn't one of the top contenders in the VPN market but this is an interesting value proposition. On top of the VPN service, FastestVPN boasts ad and malware blocking, up to 10 connections at once and a cloud storage and password manager tool.

View Deal
Andy Sansom

Andy is a freelance writer with a passion for streaming and VPNs. Based in the U.K., he originally cut his teeth at Tom's Guide as a Trainee Writer before moving to cover all things tech and streaming at T3. Outside of work, his passions are movies, football (soccer) and Formula 1. He is also something of an amateur screenwriter having studied creative writing at university.