As of April 2022, Express VPN supports payments with Qiwi, Union Pay, YooMoney, and cryptocurrencies. It can be listed in the Red Book – one of the few paid VPNs that continues to work in Russia, despite all the efforts of the ILV to block.
Less than nowhere
Express VPN is registered in the British Virgin Islands, which operates independently from the UK. Certainly not Silicon Valley, but there are no laws requiring the collection of user data. The service needs the bare minimum of data from you: how many devices you have activated with your license, the day the application was installed, the location of the connected service (but not IP), and the amount of traffic transferred. Everything, no one collects less.
One interesting case is indicative: during the trial in 2017, one of the Express VPN servers fell into the hands of the Turkish government, however … no data was found there.
Streaming and piracy
Many VPN services restrict access to torrents, not only because you load their servers more, but also because, following the laws of their countries, they are forced to fight copyright content piracy. Without exception, all Express VPN servers support P2P file sharing, including torrents, with no connection speed limits.
As for Netflix and other streaming services, there is one interesting feature: you can access not only publicly available movies and series, but also regional catalogs that are only available in a certain country. True, we do not recommend using virtual servers for this, there are problems with them.
Key benefits
The service positions its main feature as speed, which is even included in the name. Speed refers to the bandwidth of available servers and the speed of connection to them. However, for the normal functioning of most services, the reliability of the connection is equally important – otherwise, you will lose a lot of traffic packets that will be re-sent, thereby worsening your experience. Moreover, for real-time traffic (video calls, watching streams and online games), such losses will be critical – you will simply “lag".
In our tests, packet loss did not exceed the allowable 3% even on the most remote servers, and sometimes even showed better results than when connecting to the most distant game server without using a VPN.
Negative sides
I would like to say that there are none, but unfortunately Express VPN has one drawback – the price. The service is worth every cent spent, but the cost of $ 13 per month is perhaps the highest on the market. However, if you make out a package immediately for a year (in Russia it doesn’t hurt), then the price drops to quite acceptable $ 6.67 / month, which is 49% more profitable than the tariff with monthly payment.
If you are lucky in life and you have friends, be sure to invite at least one of them to the service, because after he issues any of the subscriptions, you will both receive 30 days of use as a gift.
Outcome
Express VPN is one of the best, if not the best, click-and-go services, but premium quality comes at a price.