It’s good for up to five users and costs $19.99 per month or $11.99 per month when billed annually. Premium Family should be called Premium Family and Small Business.

Hotspot Shield operates 3,200 servers in over 80 countries. You’ll pay $12.99 per month or $7.99 per month when billed annually, making Hotspot Shield one of the more costly VPNs we reviewed. Premium has unlimited bandwidth so you can always browse and download without restrictions. Premium is designed for a single user and unlocks all server locations and VPN features. The free plan isn’t optimized for streaming services or gaming, so it’s best for testing purposes or limited web browsing and email. FreeĪs the plan’s name implies, the Free plan is free to use. When you use it on the Premium plan as an individual, it’s on the expensive side. That’s the only scenario where Hotspot Shield is a value-priced service. On a per-user basis, Premium Family costs just $2.39 per user per month on the annual plan. The big difference is that, when paid annually, Premium Family is only $4 more per month for up to four additional users. The individual plan, Premium, includes the same features as Premium Family. Among those choices, you have options for individual and family plans. While it’s nice to have a free version to test out Hotspot Shield, it’s very limited, so business users would need to upgrade to a premium version for long-term use. This complaint has resulted in a push for establishing best practices and an enforceable code of conduct for VPN providers. The CDT cited discrepancies between Hotspot Shield’s marketing claims and privacy policy. Note: The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission against Hotspot Shield in 2017, alleging that the company has logged and sold user activity to advertisers. If you’re tech-savvy, you should have no problem independently navigating most issues. While most reviews are positive, complaints share stories of slow customer service responses, problems with automatic renewals and limitations with the free version. On Trustpilot, Aura earns an average 4.8 star rating with over 170 reviews.Īura is a U.S.-based company headquartered in Virginia. Aura also has an A+ rating from the Better Business Bureau. Hotspot Shield is popular with current and past users, as signaled by a 4.8-star rating with more than 600 reviews on Trustpilot.

Before it was taken over by Aura, Hotspot Shield was part of the company AnchorFree. In addition to using Hotspot Shield as a standalone product, you can get a VPN from the same company as part of a package under the Aura brand. Hotspot Shield is owned by Aura, a provider of a suite of privacy and digital security products. Otherwise, you may want to shop around for lower prices. The pricing is much more attractive if you want to provide VPN access to a group of up to five employees. If your top concern is fast download speeds and you don’t mind paying more, Hotspot Shield could be a good choice for your unique small business needs. While download speeds were the second-fastest in our tests, upload speeds ranked near the bottom. Connecting to Hotspot Shield is simple with user-friendly apps and browser extensions. While Hotspot Shield works with all popular operating systems, it’s in many ways a no-frills VPN focused on fast connections. However, it’s also one of the most expensive VPN providers, with a monthly cost of $12.99, or $7.99 per month when billed annually. Hotspot Shield is a high-performing VPN, ranking among the fastest we tested.

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