Should you keep VPN on all the time?
Every VPN ad ends with the same line: leave it on. Always on, kill switch on, sleep with it on. I did that for years, and I've come to think that for most people, at home, it's the wrong default.
For the record, I still use one almost daily. I just stopped treating always-on as a security feature.
What always-on gets you at home
Your traffic is already encrypted for most of its journey. Google's own Transparency Report puts HTTPS page loads somewhere north of 90% of the web. The "hacker in the coffee shop reading your passwords" threat that VPN ads are built on mostly died with plain HTTP. And if someone owns your router or your laptop is infected, a VPN protects you from none of it.
The downsides of all-the-time are real, and they're weirdly never in the ads:
- Speed: even modern protocols like WireGuard cost roughly 5-10% of your bandwidth, and older setups lose a lot more. Your phone's battery notices too.
- Streaming: Netflix and the rest blacklist known VPN IP ranges, so you get the "you seem to be using a proxy" screen more often.
- Banking: banks treat VPN IPs as a fraud signal, so you get extra verification steps and the occasional account lock. PCMag literally ran a piece warning that VPN use can get your bank account flagged as hacked.
- The trust swap: your ISP only sees that you connect to a VPN, and your VPN provider now sees everything the ISP used to. You traded one watcher for another.
When always-on makes sense
Now the exceptions, because there are real ones. Keep it on 24/7 if:
- You live somewhere that censors or surveils the internet.
- Your ISP sells browsing data or throttles specific services, and the VPN fixes that.
- You're on networks you don't control all day: cafés, campus, airports, hotels.
- You torrent and don't want letters from your ISP.
- You want your IP hidden from sites and trackers, whether that's doxxing risk or just not feeding the ad bots.
If any of those describe you, the downsides above are just the price, and it's worth paying. I'm arguing with the default setting, not with VPNs.
My setup now: kill switch on at all times, auto-connect on any network that isn't mine, split tunneling for banking and streaming, off at home.
I know the always-on crowd's best argument: you never know when a network turns hostile. Fair. But at home the network is mine, and if it's hostile that means someone is already inside my router, which a VPN doesn't fix either.
Genuinely curious how many of you run 24/7 even at home, and whether it's a privacy decision or inertia at this point.
A VPN handles specific jobs: untrusted networks, nosy ISPs, geo-blocks, torrenting. It isn't an antivirus. On your own Wi-Fi with HTTPS everywhere, always-on mostly gets you slower speeds, streaming errors, and bank fraud flags, while your VPN provider takes over the watching your ISP used to do. Auto-connect off-network, off at home, and know your exceptions.