Surfshark VPN: Price and free trialSurfshark has three tiers to choose from: Starter, One, and One+. Prices fluctuate slightly throughout the year depending on seasonal sales and rival pricing, but they generally don’t deviate massively from the base price. In sales, particularly on Black Friday, we’ve seen Surfshark extend the length of an annual subscription.The Starter tier comes with the essentials, plus Alternative ID, which gives you a fake email address and fake personal details when signing up to websites you don’t trust. The One tier adds anti-virus, data-leak monitoring and a private search engine. One+ adds identity theft coverage (for US users) and Incogni, a service that finds your personal information on company databases and hounds data brokers, spam callers and marketers to remove it on your behalf.If you want the best value, the long-term plans are where Surfshark shines. At the time of writing, the longest 24-month subscription to the Starter tier works out to £1.49 a month. If you don’t want to commit for two years, a 12-month plan sits at around £2.29. There’s also a rolling one-month plan at a dizzying £11.29 per month, though I suspect it mostly exists to make the 12- and 24-month subscriptions look a lot more palatable.You can pay via credit card, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay or – if you’re feeling especially privacy-conscious – any of the most popular cryptocurrencies.Surfshark didn’t have a free trial last time I reviewed it, instead offering a quibble-free, 30-day money back guarantee. Today you can try Surfshark free for seven days without making any payment, which means you won’t be out of pocket while you’re trialling the VPN. Graciously, that 30-day money back guarantee remains in place too.Surfshark is not only cheap, but it’s available on a smorgasbord of operating systems, including Android TV and Fire TV. Better yet, it supports an unlimited number of devices, so you’ll be able to connect to Surfshark on as many platforms as you like. It’s a big bonus when you compare it to NordVPN’s 10 devices or ExpressVPN’s five. Surfshark offers server locations in 100 countries (The Independent)Surfshark VPN: Features If you opt for the One or One+ tiers, Surfshark goes from a simple VPN into a full cybersecurity suite. You get Surfshark Antivirus for your Mac, PC and Android devices; Surfshark Alert, which actively monitors the dark web to see if your email or credit card details have been leaked; and Surfshark Search, a completely private, ad-free search engine.I’ve banged this particular drum in every VPN review I’ve written, but VPN providers like to capitalise on you thinking the internet is more dangerous than it is. Unless you’re really clowning around, downloading executables and ignoring warnings on dodgy parts of the internet, the built-in antivirus that comes with Windows is all most users really need. I wouldn’t recommend upgrading to One purely for Surfshark’s antivirus.A standout extra on all three tiers (including Starter) is Alternative ID, which generates a fake name, date of birth and email address for you to use when signing up for sketchy websites or newsletters, keeping the resulting spam out of your real inbox. Emails to your fake address will be securely forwarded to your normal inbox, so you can catch any login links and codes without outing your personal email address.IncogniUpgrading to the top-tier One+ plan also grants you access to Incogni, an automated service that automatically sends out data removal requests to marketing companies, forcing them to delete your personal information from their databases. When bought separately Incogni is priced at around £4.50 per month, meaning you’re saving money by bundling it with Surfshark One+.European GDPR laws make it a lot harder for marketers to legally store your personal information, so users of Incogni in the UK probably won’t benefit as much as international users. It’s difficult to track exactly how effective the service is at reducing spam calls and emails, but in my testing Incogni found my information on 44 databases and successfully removed it from 19.Curiously, my partner was found on the same set of 44 databases and had their data removed from 19, which suggests that for UK users there’s not a huge degree of personalisation happening beyond a baseline scrub of a core batch of known marketing databases. Incogni seems to be a better value-add if you live somewhere marketers are allowed to play fast and loose with your data.I tested Surfshark’s download speeds on local servers (The Independent)Surfshark VPN: LoggingBy hiding your online activity from your internet service provider, you’re simultaneously handing that information over to a private VPN company, so trust matters. To that end, Surfshark has a “no-logs” policy that means it doesn’t track, monitor or keep any record of what you do online. If authorities ever kicked down their door with a warrant, Surfshark says it wouldn’t have any user data to hand over.Surfshark has taken steps to prove these claims. The company’s no-logs policy was most recently confirmed by Deloitte in June of 2025, and Surfshark says it uses entirely RAM-only servers. This means all data is being constantly overwritten and wiped the moment a server is turned off or restarted, making it physically impossible for your browsing history to be extracted from a hard drive.Governments can make secret requests for user data, which VPNs aren’t allowed to disclose to users. To get around this, Surfshark once used a clever loophole called a “warrant canary” – a notice on its site stating that it had not received any secret subpoenas – which would be quietly removed if no longer true. Surfshark no longer uses this strategy, instead publishing regular transparency reports.In 2022, Surfshark merged with Nord Security (the parent company of NordVPN). However, Surfshark continues to operate independently out of the Netherlands, a country that has intelligence-sharing agreements with other countries, but strong consumer privacy laws that sit outside of the strict data-retention requirements found in the US or UK.Surfshark VPN: PrivacyAs for your connection, you get AES-256 encryption, an automatic kill switch (which cuts your internet if the VPN drops, preventing data leaks) and the fast, modern WireGuard protocol enabled by default. You can also use Dynamic MultiHop, which lets you bounce your connection through two different countries for double the encryption.I ran a series of privacy tests while connected to different Surfshark servers to sense-check the company’s claims using IPleak.net and DNSLeakTest. I found that Surfshark was indeed obscuring our identity.It uses the fast WireGuard protocol as the recommended default, but you can switch to OpenVPN or IKEv2 if you so prefer. If you connect using the OpenVPN protocol, obfuscation will automatically kick into effect (something Surfshark calls camouflage mode). It hides all traces that you’re connected to a VPN.There’s an in-built kill switch, but it isn’t turned on by default, so you’ll have to manually toggle it on in the settings. A kill switch blocks your device from accessing the internet if your connection drops, acting as the final line of defence so that your data is never exposed.One interesting security measure is that Surfshark utilises purely RAM-based servers, which essentially means that no data can be physically taken as with hard drive servers, and all data can be wiped remotely if necessary. It’s something that not a lot of VPN providers have switched over to just yet.Surfshark can create fake personal information to use online, including a temporary email address (The Independent)Surfshark VPN: Performance and speed Surfshark wasn’t the speediest VPN when I first tested it. But thanks to the more widespread implementation of the WireGuard protocol and a slew of major server upgrades, it’s now consistently one of the fastest VPNs I’ve tested.Connecting to a UK server resulted in roughly a 5 per cent drop in my measured broadband speeds. In practice, that makes no discernible difference when streaming or browsing with the VPN set to a local server, with just marginally longer wait times when transferring large files.Surfshark was blocked by a handful of sites over the course of a few months’ testing – mostly some retailers and ticket sellers – but switching to a new server tended to fix any issues. Google is infamous for bombarding VPNs with captchas when it detects them, but Surfshark played nicely with the search engine throughout my testing.Connections are established quickly, and the app itself is slick and easy to navigate. The interface is clean and uncluttered, while still hiding enough advanced settings in the menus to keep tinkerers happy. The app can start with Windows and connect to the fastest server automatically, and keeps a low profile on the taskbar, with no bothersome notifications.A new addition since my last review is Surfshark’s web content blocker, a free set of parental controls that lets you manage web access on your family’s devices. There’s also an email scam checker for your Gmail inbox that’s accessed with the Surfshark browser extension – though Google already has a similar feature built into its email service.Like most VPNs, Surfshark lets you designate trusted networks (like your home wifi) where the VPN won’t be used. A quick connect button connects you to the fastest server in your area, while a ‘clean web’ feature aims to block ads, trackers and malware by denying a long and constantly updated blacklist of known marketing servers.Surfshark also includes a split-tunnelling feature – now rebranded as Bypasser. This lets you choose specific apps or websites that bypass the VPN entirely. It’s perfect if you want your web browser protected, but need your banking app or a multiplayer game to run on your normal, unencrypted connection. Bypasser rolled out to all major platforms in 2025, though it’s worth noting that only websites, and not specific apps, can be filtered on iOS.Surfshark VPN: Streaming Netflix, Prime Video and Disney+Streaming services offer different libraries depending on where in the world you are. That means you’re often unable to access services like BBC iPlayer or watch your usual selection of movies and TV shows when travelling abroad.VPNs can bypass this restriction by spoofing your location. Using a VPN in this way isn’t illegal, but you should check with the streaming platform’s terms of service to find out more about their VPN policies. The major services are getting a lot better at spotting VPN traffic and will direct you to a selection of content that they have a worldwide licence for.This was sadly true of Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video in my most recent tests. These platforms don’t just look at your IP address any more, but use a combination of things to determine where in the world you actually are, including your billing address and your device’s time zone, meaning a VPN alone just isn’t as reliable as it used to be when it comes to seamlessly accessing geo-restricted content across borders.BBC iPlayer isn’t so aggressive at blocking VPN users, and would happily allow me to continue watching BBC programming while connected to a UK Surfshark server.BBC iPlayer works perfectly when connected to the VPN (The Independent)iOS and AndroidI found the Android app to be marginally better than the iOS app, if only because Android gives VPNs a greater degree of control over your phone’s data connection. Split-tunnelling has been added to the iOS app, but only for websites. The Android version allows you to whitelist apps as well as sites.Your phone’s GPS can give away your true location, so the Surfshark Android app gives you the option to spoof a GPS location that correlates with the VPN you’re using. You also get the option to turn on small data packets, which can improve connection speeds. I like the GPS spoofing feature in theory. It’s a feature I don’t often come across. But using it was a different story. Attempting to spoof my location on location-based games like as Pokémon Go (which goes against the terms of service and could get you banned) resulted in a GPS error, so I’m not sure how effective it really is.