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In February 2024 an Italian company told Italian customers to go elsewhere. AirVPN, based in Perugia, began requiring every buyer to declare they were not resident in Italy.
Nothing forced it out. Italy’s Piracy Shield obliges intermediaries to block whatever rights holders enter into a portal, within thirty minutes, before any judge sees the list. AirVPN decided that executing that list was worse than losing the market, and left.
Is AirVPN Any Good?
For a narrow group of people, yes. Open-source clients, port forwarding on every account, only OpenVPN and WireGuard, and real-time statistics published for every server it runs.
For most people, no. Streaming barely works, five devices is restrictive, the interface assumes expertise, and there is no independent audit of the no-logs claim.
⚠️ We score it 3.2, and that number says something about our scale. Two of our five criteria measure things AirVPN deliberately does not attempt.
The Italian Exit
Worth telling properly, because no other provider has done this.
The announcement came on 6 February 2024, effective on the 19th. From that date, buyers had to confirm they were not Italian residents.
AirVPN’s own reasoning was published in full. The blocking lists are compiled by private bodies authorised by the regulator. Blocks run within thirty minutes, without judicial review, without a hearing, and with no way to refuse in real time even where the error is obvious. Objections come afterwards.
Its conclusion was that the requirements were too burdensome economically and technically, incompatible with its purpose, and a route to blocking across every area of activity.
⚠️ It also pointed Italians somewhere else. The company noted more than a decade of support for the Tor network, which remains reachable from Italy, rather than pretending the loss was painless.
What It Does Well
Four things, and they are unusual rather than incremental.
Real-time transparency. Load, bandwidth and connected users are published for every server, continuously. Nobody else in our catalogue does this.
Open-source clients. Eddie can be read rather than trusted, and AirVPN runs no proprietary protocol at all — OpenVPN and WireGuard only.
Port forwarding, free, up to twenty ports. That matters for torrenting and for self-hosting, and it has been disappearing across the category — our torrenting guide covers why.
No email needed to sign up, with seven cryptocurrencies among the payment options. Only Mullvad matches that among the providers we cover.
What It Does Not
The list is as unusual as the strengths, and it is longer.
No independent audit, of any kind. For a provider whose entire proposition is trust, that is the single largest gap.
Italy is a Fourteen Eyes member. Data retention there applies to telecoms rather than to VPNs, but the jurisdiction is what it is.
Streaming does not work. Not poorly — reviewers report it failing on the major platforms, and our streaming guide would not put it on a shortlist.
Five simultaneous devices, against an industry norm of eight to ten and unlimited from Surfshark among others.
Eddie assumes you know what you want. Twelve tabs of preferences, every port treated as its own protocol option, and no graphical client on iOS.
Transparency Without Verification
This is the tension the review turns on, and it deserves more than a bullet.
AirVPN publishes more operational data than anyone we cover. Server load, user counts, bandwidth, all live. That is verification of a sort, because it is checkable at any moment by anyone.
What it does not publish is an audit. The difference between the two matters: live statistics show what the network is doing, while an audit examines whether the systems could retain anything.
⚠️ The Italian exit is evidence of a kind as well. A company willing to lose a market rather than run a blocklist is telling you something about its priorities. It is not the same as a police warrant producing nothing, and it is not nothing either.
Compare that with the field. Mullvad had officers arrive with a warrant and hand back empty, and it also publishes audits. AirVPN has conviction and no report.
| Provider | No-logs audits | Auditor | Jurisdiction |
|---|---|---|---|
| NordVPN | 6 | PwC, Deloitte | Panama |
| Surfshark | 2 | Deloitte | Netherlands (9 Eyes) |
| ExpressVPN | 3 | KPMG | British Virgin Islands, Kape-owned |
| CyberGhost | 3 | Deloitte | Romania, Kape-owned |
| PureVPN | 4 | KPMG | BVI, operated from Pakistan |
| IPVanish | 2 | Leviathan, Schellman | United States (Five Eyes), Ziff Davis-owned |
| Windscribe | 1 | Packetlabs, production infrastructure | Canada (Five Eyes); Greek case dismissed, no data to give |
| Proton VPN | 5 | Securitum | Switzerland, moving infrastructure to EU |
| Private Internet Access | 3 | Deloitte | United States (Five Eyes), Kape-owned |
| Mullvad | 10+ | Cure53, Assured AB | Sweden (14 Eyes) |
| TunnelBear | Annual since 2017 | Cure53 | Canada (Five Eyes), US parent |
| Norton VPN | 2 | VerSprite | United States (Five Eyes) |
| Hotspot Shield | 0 | protocol audited, policy not | United States (Five Eyes) |
| AirVPN | 0 | none — the client is open source instead | Italy (14 Eyes) |
| IVPN | 8, annual since inception | Cure53 | Gibraltar (status disputed) |
| Hide.me | 1 modern, in 2024 | Securitum, though one source names Altius IT | Malaysia (outside the alliances) |
| PrivadoVPN | 0 | none in six years of operation | Iceland (moved from Switzerland, 2026) |
| TorGuard | 0 | none; settled a lawsuit without disclosing records | United States (Five Eyes) |
| FastestVPN | 1, in 2023 | Altius IT | Cayman Islands (outside the alliances) |
| StrongVPN | 0 | none in over two decades | United States (Five Eyes), Ziff Davis-owned |
| VyprVPN | 1, in 2018 | Leviathan Security, before the 2023 sale | United States (Five Eyes), Certida-owned since 2023 |
| PrivateVPN | 0 | none; support says there is nothing to audit | Sweden (14 Eyes), ownership disputed |
| ZoogVPN | 0 | none; support describes one as planned | Greece (outside the alliances), run from Ukraine |
Price
Around €7 for a single month, falling to roughly €2.75 a month on the longest term, with plans running from three days to three years.
Every plan gets the same features. No premium tier, no add-ons, no feature gating — which is rarer than it sounds.
⚠️ The refund position is genuinely unclear. AirVPN’s terms describe a 30-day money-back guarantee, while some reviewers report nothing beyond the three-day plan. We could not reconcile the two, so treat the three-day option as the reliable way to test it.
Who It Is For
Buy it if you self-host, torrent, or run Linux, and if reading a preferences pane for twenty minutes sounds like a feature rather than a chore.
Do not buy it for streaming, for a household, or as a first VPN. What a VPN actually hides applies here as everywhere, and this one asks more of you than most.
⚠️ We have no affiliate relationship with AirVPN, and no link on this page earns us anything. That is worth stating on a review this positive about a company’s character.
How We Research
This review draws on TorrentFreak, Techdirt and Walled Culture for the announcement of 6 February 2024 and AirVPN’s published reasoning, on TechRadar for the position as of 2025 and the European Commission’s concerns about Piracy Shield, on Cloudwards and Australian VPN for the client behaviour, port forwarding limits, server counts and device limit, on Jazod and All About Cookies for the absence of a third-party audit, and on SafetyDetectives and ProPrivacy for pricing and payment options. Two of those sites belong to companies that also sell VPNs, which we map in full, and we weighted them accordingly. We do not run our own tests. Our full method lives on the About Us page.
AirVPN FAQ
Because Italy’s Piracy Shield requires intermediaries to block whatever authorised rights holders enter into a portal, within thirty minutes, with no judicial review and no way to refuse in real time. AirVPN judged that too burdensome and incompatible with its purpose, and closed the market from 19 February 2024.
No. We found no third-party no-logs audit of any kind, which is the largest gap in an otherwise privacy-focused service. It publishes live server statistics instead, which is checkable but tests a different question from whether the systems could retain anything.
It is one of the better options for it. P2P runs on every server, port forwarding is included free with up to twenty ports, and the client exposes enough control to configure a torrent stack properly. Streaming, by contrast, essentially does not work.
Five simultaneous connections, against an industry norm of eight to ten and unlimited from Surfshark and Private Internet Access. For a single technical user that is ample; for a household it is the reason to look elsewhere.
Its terms describe a thirty-day money-back guarantee, though some reviewers report nothing beyond the paid three-day plan. We could not reconcile the two accounts, so the three-day option is the dependable way to test the service before committing.
AirVPN
Summary
Open-source clients, port forwarding on every account, live statistics for every server, and a company that gave up its home market rather than run a blocking list. The costs are no audit at all, a Fourteen Eyes jurisdiction, five devices, and streaming that does not work.
Final Verdict
AirVPN is the most principled unproven service we cover. It gave up a country rather than run a blocking list, it publishes live data nobody else publishes, and it has never commissioned an audit.
Our 3.2 is a fair score and an incomplete one. Streaming and ease of use are two of our five criteria, and AirVPN treats both as somebody else’s problem. Judged only on privacy engineering it would sit far higher.
So read the score as a match rating rather than a quality rating. If you are the person this is built for, you already know it. If you are not, Proton VPN offers similar values with audits and an interface, and our Italy guide explains why the country in this story matters.