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hide.me VPN review

A VPN from eVenture Limited of Labuan, Malaysia, with a free plan that, hide.me says, needs no account and has no data cap or ads, a Premium plan for 10 devices, and a no-logs policy Securitum audited in 2024.

By PrivacyTechReview Editorial Team · Editor-in-Chief: Kirill Prosandeev · Reviewed Oct 30, 2026 · Documentation-based overview

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hide.me VPN is run by eVenture Limited, a company registered in Labuan, Malaysia, that says it has operated hide.me since 2012. It offers a free plan and one paid plan for individuals, Premium. hide.me says it keeps no activity logs and publishes a 2024 Securitum audit of that claim.

We haven't tested hide.me VPN ourselves, so every product fact below comes from hide.me's own website, help center, terms and privacy policy, the audit and transparency reports it links to, and its App Store and Google Play listings, as they read on October 30, 2026. Where those pages disagree, we say so.

The short answer

hide.me VPN · A no-sign-up free VPN with an audited no-logs policy

Pick hide.me VPN if you want a free VPN for one device with no account or data cap, or a Premium plan with Multihop and port forwarding for up to 10 devices — not if you need streaming servers for free, or split tunneling on an iPhone.

  • Free plan with no sign-up, ads or data cap
  • Securitum no-logs audit (2024) and yearly transparency reports

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Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • A free plan with no payment and, hide.me says, no sign-up, no ads and no data cap
  • Securitum audited its no-logs policy in 2024, and the report is public
  • Apps for Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone, Android, Android TV, Fire TV and Apple TV, plus proxy extensions for Chrome, Firefox and Edge
  • Premium covers 10 devices and adds Multihop, port forwarding, SmartGuard ad blocking and streaming servers
  • Transparency reports back to 2013; for 2025 it lists 9 law-enforcement requests and says it had nothing to hand over

Limitations

  • The free plan covers one device and 8 locations, and hide.me says free users don't get unlimited speeds
  • Streaming servers, Multihop, port forwarding and SmartGuard are Premium-only
  • No split tunneling listed for iPhone, and port forwarding built only into the desktop apps
  • The browser extensions are proxies that don't encrypt your traffic on their own
  • hide.me's pages disagree on the free data cap, location counts and protocols per app

Who it’s for

  • Anyone who wants a free VPN for one device without creating an account or hitting a data cap
  • People who want a no-logs VPN with a public audit report and yearly transparency reports, on up to 10 devices
  • Desktop users who want port forwarding and app-level controls such as StealthGuard and split tunneling

Who should look elsewhere

  • Anyone who needs streaming servers or several devices without paying
  • iPhone users who need split tunneling, or anyone who needs port forwarding in a phone app
  • People who want a no-logs audit newer than 2024, or a warrant canary

Is hide.me VPN worth it?

It depends on which plan you mean. The free plan isn't a trial: hide.me calls it a "Lifetime free VPN, not a trial," says it needs no registration and shows no ads, and its plan comparison lists unlimited data. The catch is one device at a time, a choice of 8 locations, no streaming servers, and speeds that hide.me says aren't unlimited for free users.

Premium adds 10 devices, more than 92 locations and the Premium-only features listed below. A VPN still doesn't scan your device for malware.

What hide.me VPN includes

hide.me's feature pages, app pages and help center list these, with the plans that get each one:

  • Protocols: WireGuard, which hide.me uses by default, plus IKEv2, OpenVPN, SoftEther and SSTP. Which ones each app offers varies by platform (see Limits).
  • Encryption: AES-256, and ChaCha20-Poly1305 with WireGuard, with a new key pair for each connection that hide.me says it doesn't log.
  • Kill switch: in the Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, Android TV and iOS apps. hide.me's kill-switch page says it's on by default in the desktop apps and that on phones it keeps the VPN "Always-on"; the iOS release notes list it as on by default.
  • StealthGuard: blocks chosen apps, or your whole internet connection, whenever the VPN isn't connected.
  • Split tunneling, including an inverse mode that sends only chosen apps through the VPN, on Windows, Mac and Android; the Android TV app also lets apps bypass the VPN.
  • DNS and IP leak protection, and IPv6 support that hide.me says covers all its servers.
  • Multihop: route your traffic through any entry and exit server you choose. Premium only.
  • Dynamic port forwarding over UPnP or NAT-PMP, built into the desktop apps, and a Fixed IP option. Premium only.
  • SmartGuard: DNS filtering of ads, trackers, malicious sites and optional parental-control categories, on Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Android TV. Premium only.
  • Bolt: hide.me's own feature to speed up Windows connections by tunneling TCP traffic over TLS 1.3. Premium, Windows only.
  • Streaming-optimized servers in countries including the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Germany and Japan. Premium only.

hide.me Free VPN: what the free plan includes

hide.me's free-VPN page promises "No registration, no sign up required" and "No ads or trackers, no logs." What its pages say about the free plan on October 30, 2026:

  • Sign-up and payment: no credit card; the free-VPN page says no registration is needed, and the no-logs page says you don't even need to give an email address. Other pages differ: a help article says it's the "Trial plan" that needs no registration and gives you no username and password, the Android page says to "register with just an email address," and the iPhone page says to sign up and log in.
  • Devices: one at a time.
  • Locations: 8 to choose from, per the free-VPN page and plan comparison. A help article lists 7: Finland, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK and the US.
  • Data: unlimited, per the free-VPN page, plan comparison and help center, which says the old 10 GB monthly limit is gone. The homepage FAQ still says "10 GB per month."
  • Speed: the free-VPN FAQ says free users "don't have unlimited speeds," while hide.me's Our Mission page says it doesn't throttle free users' connections.
  • Ads and logging: no ads, and the same no-logs policy as Premium.
  • Included: the same encryption as Premium, WireGuard in the apps, and round-the-clock support. OpenVPN works only inside hide.me's apps; third-party OpenVPN clients need Premium.
  • Not included: streaming servers, Multihop, port forwarding, Fixed IP, SmartGuard and Bolt.
  • Renewal: the help center explains how to renew the free plan, but no page we read says how long it lasts.

hide.me VPN plans and devices

hide.me sells one paid plan, Premium, in different lengths: on October 30, 2026, the pricing page offered 1, 14 and 28 months, and its FAQ also mentioned 3, 6 and 36 months. Its terms say subscriptions renew automatically. What each plan includes:

  • Free: the free plan above, on one device.
  • Premium: 10 devices at once on any mix of platforms, more than 92 locations and over 2,600 servers, unlimited data, streaming servers, Multihop, dynamic port forwarding, Fixed IP, SmartGuard and Bolt. hide.me says it never restricts Premium users' speed.
  • More than 10 devices: hide.me suggests a second plan, sharing a connection from a computer, or a VPN router.
  • Store purchases: Premium bought in Google Play or the App Store works on 10 devices once you set a username and password. The older Mobile plan is deprecated and the Plus plan retired.
  • hide.me Business: separate credentials for each employee; the regular service is for personal, non-commercial use.

hide.me VPN on PC, Mac, iPhone, Android, TV and routers

Where each app comes from, and what it needs, on October 30, 2026:

  • Windows: an installer from hide.me's website, version 4.3.2 for Windows 10 and 11, and version 3.17.4 for Windows 7 or later.
  • Mac: from the Mac App Store, for macOS 12 or later.
  • Linux: an open-source command-line client based on WireGuard, licensed under GPL 2.0 and published on GitHub, installed with a script from hide.me. It works on the free plan.
  • iPhone and iPad: hide.me VPN, from eVenture in the App Store, for iOS 15 or later.
  • Android: hide.me VPN: The Privacy Guard, from eVenture Limited in Google Play, or as an APK from hide.me's website, for Android 6.0 or later.
  • Chromebook: there's no Chrome OS app, but the Android app from Google Play runs on Chromebooks that support Android apps.
  • Android TV: the Android app from Google Play, for Android TV 7.0 or later.
  • Fire TV: from the Amazon Appstore; first-generation Fire TV Sticks aren't supported.
  • Apple TV: from the App Store, for tvOS 17 or later.
  • Browser extensions: hide.me Proxy for Chrome, Firefox and Edge, from each browser's add-on store. hide.me says the extension "is NOT a VPN" and doesn't encrypt your traffic unless you connect it to the hide.me app through SOCKS.
  • Routers and NAS drives: manual setup on devices that work as VPN clients, with guides for GL.iNet, Asus, MikroTik, FRITZ!Box, DD-WRT, OpenWrt, Synology and QNAP.

Privacy, logging, audits and who runs hide.me VPN

hide.me VPN is operated by eVenture Limited, registered in Malaysia under number LL09685, with its registered office in Financial Park Labuan, in the Malaysian federal territory of Labuan. Its terms (updated August 25, 2026) are governed by Malaysian law. Its privacy policy (effective January 10, 2023) and no-logs pages say:

  • Not logged: your VPN sessions, browsing and the websites you visit, and connection logs or timestamps that would match your real and VPN IP addresses or session length.
  • Kept briefly: a troubleshooting log with your randomly generated username and an internal, non-public IP address, which hide.me says is erased every few hours.
  • Counted: the amount of traffic you use, added up per month, for billing and service quality. A help-center article says hide.me doesn't record bandwidth usage.
  • Collected: your email address if you register, stored encrypted; support messages, through Zendesk; website server logs, including your IP address; and, if you opt in, anonymized crash reports and diagnostics. Processors such as Paddle and PayPal handle payments. The policy also allows third-party cookies that "deliver advertisements on and through the Service."
  • Where: data is transferred to and processed in Malaysia. hide.me says it runs its own server network without third parties, and a help article says its servers are RAM-only.
  • No-logs audit: Securitum, a security firm in Poland, audited hide.me's no-log policy for its VPN servers from March 19 to June 6, 2024. It reviewed VPN configuration files and the server deployment process, interviewed staff, and examined a snapshot of an example server container that hide.me supplied, which it accepted as representative because all VPN servers are deployed from the same image. Its June 7, 2024 report says the policy "is indeed applied" and that the audit reflects the service as of March 15, 2024.
  • Audit findings: Securitum found no alert for unauthorized configuration changes, though it noted other safeguards, and inactive scripts that could spot BitTorrent traffic to block it, which it judged no privacy threat.
  • Earlier certification: a May 2015 hide.me blog post says Leon Juranic of DefenseCode Ltd certified hide.me as a no-activity-log VPN, but the only statement it quotes from DefenseCode covers security testing of hide.me's member web application and its source code, not logging, and the post links no report.
  • App assessment: a December 2023 hide.me post says its app passed an independent MASA audit and earned Google Play's Independent Security Review badge; Google Play's Data safety page doesn't show that badge today.
  • Transparency: reports covering 2013 to 2025. For 2025 hide.me lists 29,621 DMCA notices, 514 abuse complaints and 9 law-enforcement requests, tied to VPN exit IP addresses, and says it has "nothing to hand over." No page we read publishes a warrant canary.
  • App-store labels: Apple's says the developer doesn't collect any data from the app, which Apple notes it hasn't verified. Google Play's says no data is collected or shared, data is encrypted in transit, and you can't request deletion.

Is hide.me VPN legit and safe?

It's a VPN from a named company that gives its registration number and Labuan address in its terms, publishes a third-party no-logs audit report and has published transparency reports since 2013. The VPN Trust Initiative, an industry group under the i2Coalition, shows hide.me's Trust Seal as active on its verification page.

hide.me says Malaysia has no mandatory data retention law for VPN providers and isn't in the Five, Nine or Fourteen Eyes alliances. Its privacy policy says it will obey a court order from an authority with jurisdiction over it but can't hand over data it doesn't have, and that if the law ever required logging, it would tell customers and move jurisdictions or close the service.

That is documented evidence, not a guarantee: the latest audit describes the servers as of March 2024, and a transparency report shows what a company says it received. Get the apps only from hide.me's site, the App Store, Google Play, the Amazon Appstore or the browser add-on stores; hide.me itself warns against APKs from other sources.

Limits to know before you choose a plan

  • Every connection resets after 24 hours; hide.me says this session limit is fixed and can't be disabled.
  • Port forwarding is built into the desktop apps only (manual connections can request it with an "@pf" username suffix), and ports below 10000 can't be forwarded. There are no dedicated IP addresses; Fixed IP reserves an address on a server, which someone else may get when that server is very loaded.
  • Torrents and P2P are supported on standard servers but not on streaming servers.
  • Split tunneling is listed for Windows, Mac and Android, not iPhone, though the homepage promises per-app routing "on every device." The kill-switch page names only the Windows and Mac apps; other app pages and release notes describe one too.
  • Browser extensions: their pages give free users three locations; a help article says five.
  • Pages disagree on basics: free data is unlimited or 10 GB a month, free locations 8 or 7, Premium locations more than 92 or 89, and whether the free plan needs registration.
  • Protocol details vary: the protocols page lists SSTP only for desktop systems, a help article adds Android, and a March 2026 post adds iPhone and Apple TV.
  • The no-logs page says Securitum confirmed the policy "this year," but the report it links is dated June 2024. The terms' billing cycles (30 to 1,095 days) don't match the 14- and 28-month plans on the pricing page.

hide.me VPN free trial and refund window

hide.me offers a free plan rather than a free trial of Premium. Its pricing FAQ says the free service comes with "no trials, payments, or sign-ups," but a help article also mentions a no-registration "Trial plan," and the app release notes mention free trials without saying what they include or how long they last.

hide.me's terms, last updated August 25, 2026, give a full refund if you ask by email within the first 30 days, for a first order only, if you haven't claimed a refund before and haven't broken the terms; purchases made through Google Play or the App Store follow those stores' refund policies instead.

hide.me VPN alternatives

Our verdict

The free plan is unusually open: hide.me says no sign-up, no ads and no data cap, with the same encryption as Premium, but only one device and 8 locations. Premium adds 10 devices, more than 92 locations, streaming servers, Multihop, port forwarding and SmartGuard. The evidence hide.me offers is a public Securitum no-logs report from June 2024, transparency reports back to 2013 and an active VPN Trust Initiative seal; there's no newer audit and no warrant canary. The trade-offs are features that vary by platform and pages that disagree on basics such as the free data cap. Start with the free plan if one device is enough; consider Premium for streaming servers, more devices or port forwarding.

Bottom line

hide.me VPN · A no-sign-up free VPN with an audited no-logs policy

Pick hide.me VPN if you want a free VPN for one device with no account or data cap, or a Premium plan with Multihop and port forwarding for up to 10 devices — not if you need streaming servers for free, or split tunneling on an iPhone.

  • Free plan with no sign-up, ads or data cap
  • Securitum no-logs audit (2024) and yearly transparency reports

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Sources · checked Oct 30, 2026

Frequently asked questions

Is hide.me VPN really free?
Yes. hide.me has a free plan that needs no payment and, per its free-VPN page, no registration. It covers one device at a time and 8 locations. hide.me's free-VPN page, plan comparison and help center say it has no data cap, though its homepage FAQ still mentions 10 GB a month. Streaming servers, Multihop, port forwarding and SmartGuard need Premium.
Is hide.me VPN legit and safe?
It's run by eVenture Limited, a company registered in Labuan, Malaysia, under number LL09685, which says it has run hide.me since 2012. Securitum audited its no-logs policy in 2024, and its report says the policy is applied. hide.me also publishes yearly transparency reports, and the VPN Trust Initiative lists its seal as active. That's evidence, not a guarantee: the latest audit reflects the servers as of March 2024.
Does hide.me VPN keep logs?
hide.me says it doesn't log your sessions, your browsing, or the IP addresses and timestamps that could tie a connection to you. Its privacy policy does describe a troubleshooting log with a random username and an internal IP address that's erased every few hours, and a monthly count of how much data you use. If you register, it keeps your email address; its privacy policy says paying customers can remove it, and a help article says anyone can.
How many devices can I use with hide.me VPN?
One at a time on the free plan and 10 at once on Premium, on any mix of platforms. You can install the apps on as many devices as you like, and hide.me says a VPN router lets you connect as many devices behind it as you wish.
Can I torrent with hide.me VPN?
hide.me says its standard servers support P2P and torrents, but its streaming servers don't. It recommends StealthGuard and the kill switch for torrent apps, and Premium adds dynamic port forwarding in the desktop apps. Its transparency report lists 29,621 DMCA copyright notices for 2025, tied to VPN exit IP addresses.
Does hide.me VPN work with Netflix and other streaming services?
hide.me runs streaming-optimized servers in countries including the US, UK, Canada and Japan, but only for Premium users. It says streaming sites that block VPNs usually work only through those servers, and that its browser extensions aren't made for streaming.
Is the hide.me Chrome extension a VPN?
No. hide.me says its Chrome, Firefox and Edge extensions are proxies that hide your IP address in that browser but don't encrypt your traffic unless you pair them with the hide.me app through SOCKS. They're free, need no account and have no data cap; the extension pages list three locations, and a help article says free users get five.

hide.me VPN — our verdict

A no-sign-up free VPN with an audited no-logs policy

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