Mullvad in 2026: The VPN for People Who Don't Want to Be a Customer
Mullvad doesn't ask for your email address, doesn't do promotional pricing, and doesn't care who you are. That's either exactly what a VPN should be, or more privacy than you actually need.
The decode
The model is genuinely different. You don't create an account — you get a randomly generated 16-digit number, and that number is your entire identity to Mullvad. You can pay a flat 5 euros per month in cash posted to Sweden, by bank transfer, or with cryptocurrency, and the price has been the same for years with no introductory rates or renewal traps. The apps are open source, the servers run without disks where possible, and its no-logs stance has been tested in the real world: in 2023 Swedish police served a search warrant and left with nothing, because there was no customer data to seize. Speeds on WireGuard are consistently strong.
The catch
The catch. Mullvad has deliberately walked away from the streaming market — if unblocking Netflix libraries is why you want a VPN, look elsewhere. It also removed port forwarding in 2023, which matters to torrenters. There's no live chat support, no browser extensions bundle, and no multi-year discount because there are no discounts at all: 5 euros a month is the price, forever, which is honest but not the cheapest if you were going to commit long-term anyway. And if you lose that account number without a backup, there's no recovery — the anonymity cuts both ways.
The bottom line: Mullvad is the closest thing to a VPN that collects nothing and hides nothing about how it operates — as long as you don't need streaming unblocks or hand-holding.
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