Transparent, community-driven VPN reviews.
In the privacy world, companies and customers look for one-stop shops to privacy and anonymity, making VPNs some of the most over-marketed and untransparant industries to-date.
We’ve developed a community-driven process of systematically reviewing VPNs, while offering resources to educate individuals on VPN providers.
- For our full VPN comparison chart click here
- For our in-depth video reviews for every service we test, click here.
- For a list of VPNs we are looking to review or currently reviewing click here.
We make our VPN reviews systematic to exclude as much bias as possible. You’ll find our review protocol here; you are even able to modify our percentages and scoring to fit your individual needs.
Most speed tests on the internet are fundamentally useless, as speeds are predominantly dictated by a user’s location and the server they are connecting to. A reviewer testing a VPN from San Jose can get drastically different results than a user testing the same VPN in Australia.
We are addressing this issue with a world-wide VPN speed team. This will:
- Average-out speed results worldwide to confidently say VPN X is faster than VPN Y (on average)
- Offer data for individual countries (and sometimes states) so users within those locations can view the speeds of a VPN within their general location.
This is a massive project with a plethora of logistical issues. It's early in development and many improvements need to be made to scale the project.
This readme is brought to you buy NordVPN... NOT
Sponsorships can be fine, but they've led to massive amounts of misinformation, fake and/or biased reviews, & other...questionable practices. (We could write an entire article on the VPN industry)
We have not and will never be sponsored by a VPN provider. Period.
Because services are reviewed systematically, we are able to set transparant affiliate standards:
- Our first requirement is a minimum score of 4.20/5 in the review protocol. If a VPN scores any less, we are unable to offer an affiliate link. This is a standard we set for ourselves, and this requirement has no effect on the testing of a service.
- Affiliate plans are never considered during testing, and services without an affiliate plan are equally likely to perform the same as a non-affiliate service.
- Affiliate plans are never hidden. We include both a standard link and an affiliate link in our reviews, clearly labeled. If a user doesn't want to support us--they have the choice not to.
- Even if a VPN scores 4.20/5 or higher, it must also pass our standard channel affiliate requirements found here.
- If all safeguards fail, we hold ever right to cancel affiliate plans we deem to violate community trust.
Our review protocol is constantly evolving. We are continually accepting community feedback to find ways of making our testing as accurate as possible. You'll find all the changes we've made over the years here.
Depends on your use-case, threat model, and what you’re trying to gain. We recommend the following resources covering VPNs and their use case:
We don't care about affiliate rates (or if you have one at all) to get your review completed. We don't evaluate what services to review or how they perform based on affiliate plans. View more information here.
We don't accept any form of sponsorships on our videos. View more information here.
Great question!
- Check the VPN status page to make sure you're on our radar. If you're not, send us an email to be added. (https://techlore.tech)
- At this point, it really is a waiting game. We evaluate what the community is commonly requesting as well as what previous reviews are in need of an update. We are working with very limited bandwidth so please be understanding of our time.
- When we finally get to reviewing your service, we will reach back out to you to confirm we have begun testing your VPN.
- After we have finished reviewing the VPN, we will then inquire about any offered affiliate plans (assuming you met our requirements.
- Publish the review and rejoice!