Mullvad Review

Swedish VPN that signs you up with a random account number and charges a flat 5 euros a month. Suits privacy-first users who can live without streaming.

Mullvad has spent fifteen years designing a VPN so that anonymity comes from how the service works. The Swedish service, headquartered in Gothenburg, issues each new customer a randomly generated 16-digit account number. There is no email field, username or password recovery, so there is no profile to compromise.

Payment can be made by cash sent by post, bank wire, Bitcoin or Monero, which keeps the whole subscription free of identifying records. That design was tested in April 2023, when Swedish police arrived at the office with a search warrant and left with nothing useful. The provider's own report, corroborated by TechRadar and Techdirt, confirmed that no customer data existed to seize.

Most no-logs claims in this category have never faced a real subpoena, so this outcome is the closest thing to evidence we have seen. The technical setup matches the policy. Servers run from RAM only, so a power cycle wipes them.

In December 2024 independent reviewers from X41 D-Sec published a white-box application audit covering the desktop and mobile clients. Six findings were logged and none was critical. The apps were graded at a high security level.

Cure53 and Assured ran similar reviews in earlier years. We read each report before drawing conclusions. This approach has a visible cost.

Engadget measured a 26% drop in download speed and a 17% drop in upload speed worldwide. We would call that modest for a privacy-first service. Against competitors tuned for speed it is noticeable.

Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Disney+ and Max rarely unblock. Top10VPN documents the failures and the split-tunnel workaround. Port forwarding, once a draw for torrent users, was removed on 1 July 2023 because of repeated abuse.

The network has around 866 servers in 39 to 50 countries, one or two orders of magnitude below NordVPN or Private Internet Access. Pricing follows the same thinking. Mullvad has charged a flat 5 euros a month since 2009.

It does not discount longer terms or run Black Friday sales. It also has no affiliate program. Support is by email only.

The only browser extension is for Firefox. We think Mullvad suits buyers who put documented privacy ahead of streaming and would rather not commit to a multi-year contract. They give up a large server fleet in exchange for a service that has been shown to hand over nothing.