You may have heard in recent days that Mullvad's co-founder and co-owner, Daniel Berntsson, donated ~$500,000 of his personal money to the controversial populist Örebro Party in Sweden.

While Mullvad's representatives say that this donation does not represent the values of the brand, it's hard to detach the co-owner of the company from the company itself. This is why we at Windscribe would like to get ahead of any potential public outcry about us by disclosing our CEO's personal donations as well.

It would be hypocritical for us to criticize Daniel Berntsson's donations when our CEO, Yegor Sak, has also made monetary donations to organizations supporting causes he believes in. More importantly, we want to be transparent with our users because without context, the donations may be seen as supporting a specific side or specific opinions.

Let us make one thing clear: we are not here to lie. Yes, our CEO has made donations to a specific side, but today we want to come clean and make things right.

Windscribe's CEO Yegor Sak is a proud owner of a corgi named Snoop. He loves his dog and because of that, has personally donated money to the Save Our Scruff dog rescue here in Toronto. But we understand that this can cause division within our userbase, as many will see a bias towards dogs, while cats get no love. So today, we are making one thing clear - we support cats as well, and Yegor has personally donated to the local Annex Cat Rescue organization to support their work.

We understand that this may be shocking information to some of you, and hope that you can forgive the lack of transparency until now. The Windscribe brand itself does not endorse any particular side in the dogs versus cats debate, and the opinions and donations are exclusively a reflection of Yegor's personal beliefs. Our service and applications are not affected by these donations. They remain secure and dedicated to providing our users with the best VPN on the market.

Thank you,

Windscribe Team

https://preview.redd.it/tgtjkgqphiah1.png?width=1238&format=png&auto=webp&s=e72a9375003b0474545c6669aa07f797107b4bb7

https://preview.redd.it/1550qzpqhiah1.png?width=1214&format=png&auto=webp&s=83ac576f1ef54beeb268b1d025f53b4ed586aec8

SHILL WATCH #1: "Best VPN with a free trial"

Welcome to Shill Watch, where we dissect Reddit posts that look to have been grown in a lab to rank on Google, then answer the question for real.

Yes, we are Windscribe, a VPN company telling you not to blindly trust VPN companies and recommendations. Yes, the irony is palpable, but we’ve been honest and transparent with users for over a decade so we’re not here to start feeding you nonsense now.

If you’re looking for the actual answer to the above question, skip to the last section of this post.

This is a lengthy write-up so if you don’t want to read the whole thing, here’s a quick TL;DR:

Be weary of Reddit results in search engines and AI answers. Very often, SEO optimization and affiliate link farming has overtaken the authentic user opinion posts that you’re likely searching for, and you might end up trusting the info of someone who doesn’t have your best interest in mind.

The Bait

Search "best VPN with free trial" on Reddit and you will find the same post in ten different subreddits. The title matches the search query, often word for word, and despite the super real and genuine “user” asking a question in the title, the body of the post already contains a neat provider list with feature blurbs. It doesn’t take long for beautifully formatted comments to start weighing in, occasionally carrying 23,000 upvotes in a niche subreddit that usually gets twelve.

We’re going to show you four real examples of this behavior on Reddit. We blurred the usernames in the screenshots but kept the subreddit names so you know where it happened.

Exhibit A: The Keyword Bait (r/VPN_Question)

>"Best VPN with free trial? Need to test before buying"

The title here pretty much IS the Google search query. The body pre-loads the answer with a comparison of providers and their trial terms, stuffing the post with brand names (CyberGhost, Surfshark) and as many feature keywords (trial, speed, reliability, streaming, etc) as they can. If you’re at all familiar with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), it doesn’t take long to see that this post was designed to rank. And at the risk of upsetting our respected English speakers who prefer to write properly, this post doesn’t contain a single English error. Not one missing comma or apostrophe, perfect capitalization of brand names, zero spelling mistakes. But we’ll let you decide if you think that last point is suspicious or not.

https://preview.redd.it/wzn5bj1ehi7h1.png?width=2017&format=png&auto=webp&s=77336178f3b715e1841d92b0c5bae6fa76953b3d

Exhibit B: 23,000 Upvotes (r/FitGirlRepack)

>"What's the best VPN with free trial?"

A comment recommending a specific provider gets 23K upvotes. The reply below it, pushing a "VPN comparison spreadsheet" with "the best deals already in there," gets 2.6K upvotes. A third reply agreeing gets... 3. If you browse Reddit for not even that long, you quickly pick up on how upvote numbers and patterns look in posts of various popularity. In our opinion, a drop from 23,000 upvotes on a main comment down to 3 just two replies below does not look like organic engagement from users.

https://preview.redd.it/ah80qfhuhi7h1.png?width=2016&format=png&auto=webp&s=f63110b3a5026d9247e0e05056b7f3e8a46318b4

Exhibit C: The Affiliate Listicle (r/VPNReviewHub)

>"Best VPN with actual free trials"

This “user” (with a very fellow consumer “Kill Switch On” flair) decided to put together a very helpful formatted listicle ranking five VPNs by their trial terms. And remember, this is a list of VPNs with ACTUAL free trials. Problem is, every single provider on the list requires a credit card. There are no genuinely free VPNs mentioned anywhere. Not Proton (unlimited, no card). Not hide.me (unlimited, no card). Not even us (10GB/m Free plan, no card). If the goal was to help someone find a free option with this list, leaving out any option that is actually free and requires no payment info is an interesting choice. 

Once again, if you’re familiar with Redditors, especially the tech-focused nerds (we’re using “nerd” as a term of endearment here) then you’ll be aware of the effort they like to put into their research and objective recommendations. A genuine post suggesting VPNs with actual free trials would have exactly that. But again, we’ll let you decide if this looks genuine to you.

https://preview.redd.it/q6tlq685ii7h1.png?width=1680&format=png&auto=webp&s=018eb6362c2af026921252d3ba16ee1f115b2873

Exhibit D: The Review Site Cosplay (r/CyberGuides)

>"What's the best VPN with a free trial? Reddit help"

You ever do hours of research and testing and then ask a question in which you present as thorough of an answer as anyone can give you? Well that’s what you’re looking at here. You get a full comparison table with a pricing column, speed benchmarks, jurisdictions and more. Despite all this research and effort, somehow this is a request for help from Reddit. And once again, it’s a post with perfect English, very neat formatting, and stuffed with SEO keywords to rank in search. 

What you’re looking at here is an affiliate review site dressed up as a Reddit post. "I installed each VPN on my laptop and smartphone" reads like SEO copy because it is structured identically to what you’d see on affiliate review sites that rank for this query on Google.

https://preview.redd.it/2inxsb3cii7h1.png?width=1607&format=png&auto=webp&s=27cc0ca7019f659feececb70250a36b3275f287f

What’s Going On?

You might be wondering what the point of these posts are. Do these accounts post just to farm Reddit Karma on their profile? Not exactly. As mentioned above, a lot of this is done for SEO purposes - to get these Reddit posts ranking high in Google and other search engine results when people search for the relevant terms. But that doesn’t answer the question, what’s the point of a Reddit post ranking high in search engine results? Reddit Karma doesn’t pay so those upvotes are monetarily useless. In our opinion, there are 2 reasons you might see these sorts of threads.

Affiliate Link Payouts

The first is affiliate link farming. When you see a post that shows a bunch of recommendations of VPNs, linking to the websites of those providers, you will very often see that those links are affiliate links. Many VPNs offer affiliate programs which reward you with actual money for getting new people to register and pay for their services. Using a unique URL tied to your VPN account, they can track when a new person clicks and subscribes, and attribute a payout to your account.

We’re not talking about pennies per subscription, VPN providers will pay $30+ per new subscription which you brought in. These are standard payout structures available to anyone, not some special rate reserved for 10 million subscriber YouTubers. Given these payout numbers, you can now understand how quick the money pile can grow the higher you rank on Google for common searches like “best vpn trial”.

A quick note on Windscribe in this regard - we discontinued our affiliate program in 2021 because this sort of paid structure greatly diminishes objective opinions of VPN products for consumers. When a company pays people to get as many new subscribers as possible, it’s not hard to see how this will incentivize everyone to rank VPNs with the highest-paying affiliate programs as the best options, even when they’re objectively very much not. If Toyota paid you $5000 every time you got someone to buy one of their cars, the only car you’d ever recommend would be a Toyota, and you’d go out of your way to do so.

Brand SEO Tactics

Now what about the posts without affiliate links? Well this second reason might require you to question who is actually posting and what they might have to gain from it.

Search Engine Optimization is an entire massive industry that has existed for years, dedicated to nothing but trying to reverse engineer search ranking algorithms. They use all the tools and knowledge at their disposal to eek out a few extra ranks in search, because that directly translates to more money.

Reddit is the 6th most visited website on the planet, and for many years has featured dedicated communities of real people trying to help each other. So when the quality of Google’s search results started declining, (in combination with Reddit’s abhorrent search function which no one uses) people would simply slap ‘reddit’ onto the end of a question they were asking in the Google search bar to see the results from Reddit. They want the opinions, knowledge and experience of real people who will tell you their honest view on things. Google recognized this and adjusted their algorithms to automatically start including Reddit results even when the user didn’t add it to the search query. Now with LLMs and AI models very often citing Reddit results in the info they provide, the value of Reddit as a brand discovery tool has skyrocketed even further.

All this is to say - don’t think Reddit is some sacred authentic-only platform free from manipulation. The desirability of info from Redditors has been well-known by SEO experts for years and it's used to shill you products. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using SEO tricks to provide people with full, objective information but unfortunately, this often isn’t what you see. Instead you get brands telling you half-truths and strategically omitting facts to benefit themselves.

We won’t name any names, but our own SEO folks have done extensive research into this to confidently say that there’s some suspicious posting going on, we’re not just pulling these theories out of thin air.

The Tells

Keep in mind that this does not exist within only the VPN sphere, any sort of products and services where people might ask for recommendations are affected by similar patterns. I was recently looking for a walking treadmill and ran into the same exact problems.

Let’s do a quick recap of the signs something isn’t authentic on Reddit.

• The title is the search query. Humans ask messy questions, they’re not thinking about SEO. If the title looks like something Google autocompletes in the search bar, be wary of the content in the post.
• The post already contains the answer. "Just asking a question!" and at the same time providing a formatted provider comparison doesn’t exactly scream organic post.
• Unhinged engagement numbers. Human brains are excellent at pattern recognition, so recognize strange patterns. 23K upvotes on a VPN comment in a piracy subreddit and a "comparison spreadsheet" reply getting 2.6K while nothing in that sub gets anywhere near those numbers should raise some flags.
• Every "free trial" on the list requires a payment method. Tech-focused Redditors lean heavily into free options that are actually good. They’re quick to call out free options with ads, hidden terms and requirements, and brands with bad track records. If someone was honestly trying to help you avoid spending money, they would mention the VPNs that are actually free.
• The format is always the same. Listicle structure, bullet-pointed features, trial terms, sometimes a full comparison table. Normal users ask one or two messy sentences when they’re seeking help, they typically don’t arrive having done more research than anyone answering would. Also watch for a soup of SEO keywords in a perfect English writeup.
• All or most of the links are affiliate links. This one can be harder to catch, but hover over the links and see if it has any extra parameters in the URL or if it even goes to the VPN’s website. What you should see is something simple like https://windscribe.com/. A URL like https://windscribe.com/upgrade?affid=vset87n4p5y is linking the poster’s affiliate ID. And if you see a link shortener instead of the actual website, it’s likely there to mask the affiliate link.

The Real Answer

If you searched "best VPN with a free trial," what you probably want is to test a VPN without any billing hassle - no payment method, no auto-payment for 1 year after trial ends, no need to cancel.

Let’s define some terminology:

Free tier = use it forever, no credit card or payment method required. Limited by data, locations, and/or speed.

Free trial = temporary access that starts a paid subscription. Great if you cancel on time but annoying if you’re not on top of your calendar to cancel before being charged.

Money-back guarantee = you pay first, then request a refund if you remember. That is not free, and often requires a grueling process of talking to support to get the refund.

Now we arrive at our own comparison table. There are no affiliate links here, we’re simply going to present the facts that each of these providers give themselves. And yes we are Windscribe so we’re going to rank ourselves at the top because we’re genuinely one of the best VPNs on the market, objectively.

Sources: Each provider's own pages, verified June 4th 2026.

Notice how the bottom four (card required, no permanent free option) are exactly the ones plastered across every "free trial" thread. Windscribe (actually free, no card) is almost never mentioned which is not a coincidence. A free user generates zero affiliate commission, whereas a trial user who forgets to cancel before being charged becomes a source of income.

The bigger point: before trusting any VPN recommendation on Reddit, check three things:

1. Does the "free" option require a payment method?
2. What happens when the trial ends?
3. Is the person recommending it using a tracked link, a comparison spreadsheet with "the best deals," or a fully formatted review table?

In conclusion, just be more vigilant when doing your research. Yes, it will take a bit more time, but you will find better results. Understand that these days, the Reddit recommendation you might be reading could be dressed as an “authentic user experience” while actually just coming from the ad team of the brand being vouched for in the post. Or it’s just some guy gaming the system to maximize his own profits through affiliate link farming. YOU on the other hand might end up getting an objectively worse product or service.

Don’t be a sucker.

https://preview.redd.it/lxxx9xe8x0zg1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=0bfff6d2c1d5cc6477d93bf9f6cf6f61e4c700dd

This is our biggest prize pool ever! HUGE cash prizes for winners and of course Windscribe Pro as well. Don't miss out if you're an animator of any sort, even AI, since we got categories for both human and AI animations!

Deadline to submit is end of day May 17th. All the details about the contest are here: https://windscribe.com/wap