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Every other provider we cover sells you a discount and then raises the price. NordVPN goes from about $3.39 a month to $11.59. Proton VPN goes from $2.99 to $6.99. The multiplier is roughly the same across the category, and budgeting for the second year is the single most useful thing we tell readers.
Mullvad has charged €5 a month since 2009. No tiers, no annual plans, no promotional rate, no renewal increase. Seventeen years, one number.
It also refuses to learn your email address, and in April 2023 Swedish police arrived with a search warrant and left with nothing. This Mullvad review covers why that happened, and what it costs you — because it costs you a fair amount.
Is Mullvad Worth It in 2026?
Yes, if privacy is the actual purchase rather than a feature you also want. Anonymous sign-up with no email, more than ten published audits, RAM-only servers, and a no-logs claim tested by an actual police raid. The price is €5 a month forever, which works out to roughly $260 across four years.
The cost: five simultaneous devices, around 700 servers, no reliable streaming, and no browser extensions.
Mullvad at a Glance
Pros
- ✔ Flat €5 a month since 2009 — no discounts, no tiers, no renewal increase
- ✔ No email, no name, no account details: a random account number is your entire identity
- ✔ More than ten independent audits by Cure53 and Assured AB, all published with findings intact
- ✔ Swedish police executed a search warrant in April 2023 and found nothing to take
- ✔ Cash accepted by post, alongside cryptocurrency and cards
- ✔ RAM-only servers, open-source apps, and P2P allowed across the whole network
Cons
- ✖ Five simultaneous connections, against seven to unlimited elsewhere
- ✖ Around 700 servers in 40-plus countries, a fraction of the mainstream networks
- ✖ Streaming is neither optimised nor promised
- ✖ Port forwarding was removed in 2023, which affects seeding on private trackers
- ✖ OpenVPN was retired in January 2026 — WireGuard only now
- ✖ No browser extensions at all
The Account Number Is the Product
Most providers ask for an email because they want to sell to you later. Mullvad decided at launch that it did not want the option.
You click a button and receive a sixteen-digit number. That number is your account. No email, no username, no password, no security question. You top it up when you want service and it works.
Payment can be genuinely unlinked too. Cryptocurrency works, and so does cash sent by post — you write your account number on a slip, put it in an envelope with banknotes, and Mullvad credits the account when it arrives. That is not a marketing gesture; it removes the payment processor from the chain entirely.
⚠️ Lose the number and the account is gone. There is no recovery, because recovery would require Mullvad to know something about you. Write it down somewhere physical before you close the tab.
Why this matters more than it sounds. A no-logs policy tells you what a company chooses not to record. An architecture with no email address tells you what it cannot record. What a VPN actually hides covers the difference between the two claims.
April 2023: The Raid
This is the strongest evidence any provider in our coverage has, and it happened by accident rather than by design.
Swedish police arrived at Mullvad’s offices with a search warrant seeking customer data. Staff explained that no such data existed. After discussion, and with counsel present, the officers left without seizing anything.
Nothing was handed over because nothing was stored. RAM-only servers hold no persistent records, accounts hold no identity, and payment records are not linked to account numbers.
⚠️ A raid is not an audit, and that is exactly the point. An audit examines a system that knows it is being examined. A search warrant does not schedule itself.
Three providers we cover have now been tested by legal process rather than by appointment: PIA’s three federal subpoenas, ExpressVPN’s server seizure in Istanbul, and this. All three produced nothing. That is a small club, and it is worth more than any number of scheduled reviews.
The Gothenburg search warrant is the clearest evidence any provider has. We put it alongside every other unscheduled test we could document, including the two that went the other way.
Another Swedish provider has never been tested at all — same country, opposite evidence.
Audits: More Than Ten, All Published
Cure53 and Assured AB have audited Mullvad more than ten times — the same firm TunnelBear hired in 2016 for the industry’s first published VPN audit. The 2022 Cure53 review found minor issues; Mullvad fixed them and published the report with the findings still in it. The 2023 Assured infrastructure audit tested whether the no-logging claims were technically enforced rather than merely written down.
Every report stays on the website. No account, no NDA, no summary press release standing in for the document. At the other end of the category, Hotspot Shield has no no-logs audit at all.
That places Mullvad alongside Proton VPN’s five annual published audits in the small group where you can read the evidence rather than take a company’s word for the conclusion — and set against each other, the two come down to something other than proof.
⚠️ Sweden sits inside the 14 Eyes arrangement, which reads badly on a jurisdiction chart. In practice the architecture makes the point moot: an intelligence-sharing agreement cannot share records that were never created. What Swedish law can and cannot reach covers the three powers involved, including the one that gets to a device before encryption.
Price: The Number That Never Moves
€5 a month, about $5.40, and that has been true since 2009.
There is no annual plan. Buying twelve months at once costs twelve times five euros. Mullvad’s stated reasoning is that discounts for long commitments are a way of extracting money from people who stop using the service, and it declines to run that model.
Across four years that comes to roughly $260. For comparison: CyberGhost lands near $152, Proton VPN near $240, ExpressVPN near $267, and NordVPN near $335 — figures set out in full in our cheap VPN guide. Across those nine providers, price and rating turn out to be unrelated.
⚠️ So Mullvad is mid-priced, not cheap — except by the month. What it removes is not the cost but the trap: no promotional rate to forget about, no second-year surprise, and no calculation required. Every other provider we track raises its price by between 1.3 and 3.4 times, and on a single month it is the cheapest we cover. The 30-day refund applies, and unused time is returned if you cancel.
Speed, Servers and the WireGuard-Only Decision
Independent testing puts Mullvad at 650 Mbps and seventh of twenty-two providers, with latency around 20 ms and roughly 85% of baseline speed retained on nearby servers. Fast, though not the fastest — NordVPN’s 2.9% loss remains the benchmark, and the two compared directly come down to something other than speed.
Around 700 servers across 40-plus countries is small. Mullvad’s position is that a physical server in the country listed beats a larger network padded with virtual locations, and that fewer machines are easier to maintain properly.
In January 2026 Mullvad retired OpenVPN entirely. WireGuard is now the only protocol. It is faster and simpler, but the decision has a consequence: older routers and devices that support only OpenVPN can no longer connect, and OpenVPN’s remaining advantage is exactly the case those devices represent.
⚠️ Check your router before you buy if that is how you intended to use it. Our router guide covers which firmware handles WireGuard.
Streaming and Torrenting
Streaming is the honest weak point. Mullvad does not optimise for it, does not maintain unblocking servers, and does not promise it will work. Sometimes it does; that is the whole claim. If Netflix is why you are buying, our streaming guide points elsewhere.
Torrenting is allowed across the entire network, with split tunnelling and a free SOCKS5 proxy included. However, port forwarding was removed in 2023 — Mullvad concluded it exposed some users to risk. Among providers we cover, that leaves PureVPN, PIA, Windscribe, Proton VPN and AirVPN with the feature, as our torrenting guide explains.
What We Don’t Love
Five devices is the real cost. A phone, a laptop and a tablet already use three. Every mainstream competitor gives seven, ten or unlimited, and Mullvad sells no add-on — Surfshark caps at nothing at all, for $55 less across four years.
No browser extensions. Not a dealbreaker, but a gap competitors closed years ago.
The interface assumes competence. The app itself is clean, yet account numbers, cash envelopes and WireGuard-only configuration add up to a service that expects you to know what you are doing.
Our score understates it, and we would rather say so. Mullvad scores 4.2 here because we weigh streaming equally with privacy across every review. For a reader buying privacy specifically, it is the strongest option we have examined — the number simply cannot express that.
How We Research
This review draws on Mullvad’s published audit reports from Cure53 and Assured AB, contemporaneous reporting on the April 2023 police search, the company’s own documentation of its account system and pricing, and speed results from named independent testers — cross-checked and verified at publication. We don’t run our own speed tests. Where our scoring model and our judgement disagreed, as they do here on streaming weighting, we publish both rather than adjusting the number. Our full approach lives on the About Us page.
Mullvad FAQ
Correct. You click once and receive a sixteen-digit account number, which is your entire identity with the service. There is no username, password or recovery option, because recovery would require Mullvad to hold something identifying about you. Write the number down somewhere physical before closing the page.
The jurisdiction reads badly on paper, but the architecture makes it largely moot. RAM-only servers store nothing persistent and accounts contain no identity, so there is nothing to share. Swedish police tested this directly in April 2023 with a search warrant and left without seizing any customer data.
Sometimes, and it is not promised. Mullvad does not maintain streaming-optimised servers or market unblocking as a feature. If regional catalogues are your reason for buying a VPN, other providers are built for that and Mullvad is not.
It was discontinued in 2023 after Mullvad concluded the feature exposed some users to network security risk. The decision divided its community, since port forwarding improves seeding performance on private trackers. Among providers we cover, PureVPN, PIA, Windscribe and Proton VPN still offer it.
It is mid-range rather than cheap. Across four years Mullvad costs roughly $260, against about $152 for CyberGhost and $335 for NordVPN. What you are buying is the absence of a pricing trap: no promotional rate, no annual lock-in, and no increase when the first term ends.
Mullvad VPN
The Verdict
Anonymous accounts with no email, more than ten published audits, and a no-logs claim tested by an actual police search rather than a scheduled review. The cost is five devices, a small server network, and streaming that is neither optimised nor promised.
Final Verdict: 4.2/5
Buy it if privacy is the purchase. No email, no linkable payment, published audits with findings intact, and a police raid that produced nothing. Nobody else in our coverage offers that combination.
Skip it if you need more than five devices, want Netflix to work reliably, or run an older router that only speaks OpenVPN.
And note what is absent: no countdown timer, no discount that expires, no second-year increase. Seventeen years at the same price is not a marketing position — it is the absence of one.
IVPN is the closest comparison. Same annual-audit habit and the same anonymous signup, but two devices instead of five and a jurisdiction our sources argue about.