FAQs

A VPN encrypts everything your device sends and routes it through a server somewhere else. Your internet provider stops seeing which sites you visit, and those sites see the server’s address instead of yours. That is the whole mechanism — everything else a VPN does follows from it.

In most countries, yes, and it is standard practice in business — remote workers connect to company networks this way every day. A handful of countries restrict or ban them. Using a VPN does not make an otherwise illegal act legal, and it does not exempt you from the terms of a service you have signed up to.

A little, always. Your traffic takes a longer path and is encrypted along the way. With WireGuard on a nearby server the difference is usually small enough that streaming and video calls are unaffected. Distance costs far more speed than protocol choice does — a server in the next country will beat one on another continent every time.

No, and be suspicious of anyone who says it does. It hides your traffic from the network you are on and your address from the sites you visit. It does nothing about accounts you sign in to, details you type into forms, or cookies you already carry. Tor gets closer to anonymity, at a large cost in speed.

Incognito mode stops your browser saving history and cookies on your own machine. That is all it does. It does not hide anything from your internet provider, your employer, or the sites you visit. A VPN works on the network; incognito works on your device. They solve different problems and are fine together.

You can, but understand the trade. Running servers costs money, so a free service pays for itself some other way — usually by selling browsing data or injecting advertising. Free tiers also cap bandwidth, offer few locations and throttle speed. If a service is free and you are not the customer, look at what is being sold.

Encryption and a kill switch are table stakes — everyone has them. The differences worth paying for are structural: whether the servers can physically store anything, whether the no-logs claim has been audited by someone independent, how many devices you can connect at once, and whether features are held back for a higher tier.

The server runs entirely from memory with no hard disk attached. Nothing about your session can be written down, and everything is erased the moment the server restarts. If a server were seized there would be no stored record on it to hand over. It is the physical backing for a no-logs policy rather than just a promise about one.

Not yet. An independent no-logs audit and a public transparency report are both planned and neither has been published, so we do not claim them. When they exist they will be linked here and on the why CopVPN page, including anything the auditor did not like.

For most people, no. It routes you through two servers in different countries instead of one, which adds privacy but costs speed. It is there for people who want the extra separation and are happy to trade some performance for it. It is included on every plan either way.

Servers in 65+ countries and 85+ locations, all running from RAM. Every location is included with every plan.

Distance matters more than anything else. A server in a neighbouring country is usually faster than one across an ocean, whatever the server count says. The app shows live latency in milliseconds beside every location, and the built-in speed test measures what you actually get.

Yes. Open a country in the app or in the server list and you get its cities to choose from. Countries with a single location show that one city, so the behaviour is consistent everywhere.

Yes. There is no premium server tier and no location that costs extra. Every plan reaches all 85+ locations in 65+ countries.

Regularly. Locations are added, and individual servers are rotated in and out for maintenance. The server list page shows the status at the last check; the app always shows the live picture.

The 5-year plan is the best value: it has the lowest price per month, and the longer the term, the lower the price per month. A shorter plan costs more per month but commits you for less time. The pricing page shows what each plan costs today.

The longer terms add free months on top of the term you pay for. You are billed for the term only, and the plan runs for the term plus the extra months. The pricing page shows how many each plan adds.

You pay the full term up front, on the day you buy: a 1-month plan for one month, a 2-year plan for 24 months, and so on. The per-month price on the pricing page is just what the total works out to over the term — it is not a separate monthly charge.

There is no separate free trial. The 30-day money-back guarantee does the same job: buy any plan, use everything for up to 30 days, and ask for a full refund if it is not right for you.

The panel at the top of the download page detects what you are using and offers the matching installer. If you are downloading for a different machine, every platform is listed with its own version, size and requirements.

You can install the app first, but you cannot connect without an account. The simplest order is to buy a plan, then install. If you already have a plan, sign in with the same email and password you use for My Account.

Yes. The Windows .exe is code-signed, so Windows shows CopVPN, Inc. as the publisher rather than an unknown one, and the macOS build is notarized by Apple. If your download warns about an unidentified developer, you did not get it from our download page.

Up to 20 devices can be signed in to one account, and up to 5 of them can be connected to the VPN at the same time. Only devices you have signed in on in the last 30 days count toward the 20. If a sixth device tries to connect, the app tells you the limit has been reached and nobody already connected is cut off. To sign in on another device once 20 are in use, remove one from your account first.

There is no dedicated Linux app yet. You can connect using WireGuard or OpenVPN configuration files, which support can send you. Everything else about your account works the same.

Yes. Contact support and they will move you to a different term. If you upgrade to a longer plan the remaining value of your current plan is taken into account.

Your plan runs for the term you have already paid for, so it keeps working until that term ends. If you would rather have your money back, ask for a refund under the 30-day money-back guarantee. For anything else about your plan, contact support and they will sort it out with you.

Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover and JCB, plus PayPal and Bitcoin in the normal checkout. Bank wire and manual crypto are also available, arranged through support.

Contact us within 30 days of your purchase and ask for a refund. You get the full amount back — no forms to fill in and no questions about why. It applies to every plan and every term bought through the normal checkout.

No. The 30-day money-back guarantee does not cover manual wire transfers or manual crypto payments. Those are one-time payments and are not refundable. Use the normal checkout if the guarantee matters to you.

Three things, in order. Hotel and café networks with a sign-in page often block the tunnel until you have signed in — connect to the network first, then the VPN. Some networks block UDP, in which case switching to OpenVPN helps. And if it drops only on mobile, IKEv2/IPSec survives switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data better than the others.

Some corporate and school networks block VPN installers. Try a different network, or a phone on mobile data. If it still fails, contact support and they will send you a direct link.

Disconnect, pick a different city in the same country, and try again — services block individual server addresses rather than whole countries. Clearing the site’s cookies helps too, because a stored location can override the one your address suggests.

Try a closer server first — distance costs more speed than anything else. Then check you are on WireGuard, which is the default and the fastest. If multi-hop is on, that is a deliberate speed trade. Run the built-in speed test before and after each change so you are comparing something real.

Some banks block traffic they cannot place geographically. Two fixes: connect to a server in your own country so the address matches where the account is, or use split tunneling to leave that one app outside the tunnel while everything else stays protected.

We keep no record of what you do while connected: no browsing history, no connection timestamps, no traffic logs. Servers run from RAM only, which means nothing is written to a disk and everything disappears when a server restarts. There is no stored record to leak or hand over.

The sites you visit, from your internet provider and from whoever runs the network you are on. Your IP address and the location inferred from it, from the sites you visit. And the contents of your traffic on any shared network.

Anything you hand over yourself. The email you registered with, your card details at a merchant, searches made while signed in to an account, and what you post publicly. A VPN handles the network; the rest is account hygiene.

On their network, a VPN hides the contents and destinations of your traffic from them. But if they manage the device itself — a work laptop with monitoring software — that software sees what you do before it ever reaches the tunnel. A VPN cannot help with that.

A safety catch. If the VPN connection drops for any reason — the server restarts, your Wi-Fi stutters — the app cuts your internet instead of letting it fall back to an unprotected connection. You might notice a few seconds without internet. What you will not do is send something unprotected without realising.