Hide.me

hide.me operates out of Malaysia, a jurisdiction with no mandatory data-retention law and no Eyes-alliance ties, and it turns on traffic obfuscation by default rather than treating it as an advanced option. A 2024 Securitum audit backs the no-logs claim, though it’s only the second substantive audit in the company’s history, nine years after the first — a thinner cadence than providers who commission one every year or two. The free tier is also genuinely usable, not just a crippled trial.

No-Logs Audit

hide.me’s no-logs claim has been independently audited twice: first by Defense Code Ltd in 2015, then by Securitum, a Polish cybersecurity firm, in July 2024, which reviewed server configuration, network architecture, and logging infrastructure and found no evidence that activity logs were being created or stored anywhere in the production fleet. Separately, hide.me holds a VPN Trust Initiative (VTI) Trust Seal, awarded in 2023 and re-accredited in late 2025 — a recurring industry-consortium compliance certification, though a lighter-weight signal than a full independent technical audit. The nine-year gap between the two substantive audits is worth being upfront about: it’s a real audit, recently conducted by a credible firm, but not part of an established annual or biennial cadence the way some other providers have committed to.

Pricing

Premium costs $11.99/month with no commitment, dropping to $4.58/month on a 12-month term ($54.99 billed annually), or $2.69/month on the longest 26-month term (24 months plus 2 bonus months, $69.99 billed every 26 months). hide.me’s own pricing page labels its no-increase policy a “Pricing Guarantee,” stating the plan “always renews with the same price and duration” — a real, specific, directly-sourced claim, though it’s the provider’s own statement rather than independent third-party verification. The free tier now offers unlimited data (an earlier 10GB/month cap was removed), limited to 1 device and a handful of server locations with noticeably throttled speed.

Security & Protocols

hide.me supports five protocols — WireGuard, OpenVPN, IKEv2, SoftEther, and SSTP — a broader spread than most providers, with SoftEther and SSTP particularly useful for getting through restrictive corporate or institutional firewalls. Obfuscation is switched on by default for OpenVPN and SoftEther connections, disguising VPN traffic as ordinary HTTPS traffic without requiring the user to find a separate setting. Servers run RAM-only. The “Stealth Guard” kill switch can operate at the system level (blocking all traffic if the VPN drops) or the app level (restricting only chosen apps), and split tunneling is available for selecting which apps use the tunnel.

Servers & Torrenting

Independent trackers put hide.me’s network at roughly 2,600 servers across 91 countries. P2P and torrenting traffic is allowed across the server fleet rather than being restricted to a specialty subset, and premium subscribers get access to dynamic port forwarding, which can improve P2P connection speeds by letting torrent clients form direct connections instead of routing through a centralized relay.

Jurisdiction

hide.me is operated by eVenture Ltd, registered in Labuan, Malaysia’s offshore financial territory, and the company was founded in 2012. Malaysia has no mandatory data-retention law that applies to VPN providers and sits outside the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Fourteen Eyes intelligence-sharing alliances entirely — a clean jurisdiction with no ambiguity, unlike some of the more contested cases among providers we’ve looked at.

Pros and Cons

Our Rating