Private Internet Access

PIA’s no-logs claim has survived something most providers never encounter: real subpoenas in two documented US court cases, plus a Russian server seizure, none of which produced any user data — a harder test than a commissioned audit alone. On top of that, its apps are fully open source and device connections are unmetered. The trade-off is jurisdiction: PIA is US-incorporated inside the Five Eyes alliance, and its pricing carries an unresolved discrepancy between the company’s own stated flat renewal and the higher renewal price several independent aggregators report.

No-Logs Audit & Court History

PIA’s no-logs claim rests on more than audits, though the audits are real: Deloitte Audit Romania completed two independent reviews under the ISAE 3000 (Revised) standard, the first as of June 30, 2022 (server network, configuration, and incident management systems) and a second referenced in an April 2024 update (adding the dedicated-IP token system to scope). What sets PIA apart from most of the other providers reviewed here is that its no-logs claim has also been tested adversarially, in court, more than once. In 2016, a subpoena tied to an FBI bomb-threat investigation reached PIA’s then-parent company and produced nothing beyond a shared IP address cluster. In 2018, PIA’s own general counsel testified under oath in a federal hacking trial that the company simply had no customer activity logs to hand over. Separately, when Russian authorities seized PIA hardware in mid-2016 following a new mandatory data-retention law, PIA reported that no user data was compromised — because none existed to seize — and exited the Russian market entirely rather than start logging to comply. A quarterly transparency report backs this up with real numbers: 46 government, legal, and informal requests in Q2 2025 alone, zero logs produced in any of them.

Pricing

The monthly plan costs $11.95 with no discount. The 1-year plan runs $3.33/month ($39.95 for the first year), and the longest 3-year-plus-3-month term runs $1.33/month ($79 total) — both figures directly from PIA’s own current pricing page, which states plainly that both plans autorenew at the same rate rather than jumping after the intro period. That would make PIA’s long-term pricing among the most transparent reviewed here, if accurate — but several independent aggregators report the 1-year plan actually renews closer to $56-57/year (~$4.70-4.75/mo), a real, unresolved discrepancy with PIA’s own current page that this review flags rather than picks a side on. Even under the more cautious (aggregator) reading, PIA’s steady-state price remains competitive with the cheaper end of the VPNs reviewed here.

Security & Protocols

PIA runs WireGuard and OpenVPN, and — notably — both the client apps and the underlying protocols are stated to be 100% open source, meaning the code can be independently inspected rather than trusted on faith. A kill switch and split tunneling are both standard. Port forwarding, increasingly abandoned across the industry, is still available on selected servers, useful for torrenting and self-hosting. MACE, PIA’s built-in DNS-level blocker, strips ads, trackers, and known malware domains system-wide without a browser extension. Multi-hop is available via a Shadowsocks or SOCKS5 proxy layered in front of the VPN connection — any server location can be paired with any proxy location, more flexible than providers offering only fixed multi-hop pairs, though independent testing found roughly a 28% further speed cost when enabled. There’s no dedicated obfuscation/stealth protocol in the way some other reviewed providers offer one; the Shadowsocks proxy option is the closest equivalent.

Servers & Torrenting

PIA operates in 105 locations across 91 countries as of a January 2026 expansion, including all 50 US states — one of relatively few providers with that level of US-specific coverage. The company no longer publishes an exact server count. Some locations are served virtually rather than by physical hardware in-country (e.g. India and Indonesia routes are geo-located through Singapore/UK servers) — a common industry practice, disclosed here rather than assumed. P2P and torrenting traffic is allowed, with port forwarding available on selected servers to improve connection speeds for seeding.

Jurisdiction & Ownership

PIA is incorporated in the United States, headquartered in Denver, Colorado, and was founded in 2010 under parent company London Trust Media. The US has no federal mandatory data-retention law, but is a founding member of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance. Kape Technologies, an LSE-listed holding company, acquired PIA from London Trust Media in a deal announced November 2019 and completed that December for roughly $130 million — the same company that owns another VPN reviewed on this site, and whose earlier incarnation, Crossrider, had a history tied to adware.

Pros and Cons

Our Rating