Free VPN, without the catch: your own machines, encrypted

What "free VPN" usually means

Most services that present themselves as free VPNs are anonymization services: all your Internet traffic goes through their servers, which send it back out under another IP address. Yet carrying the traffic of millions of users is expensive — servers, bandwidth, operations. A service that charges nothing has to fund itself some other way.

Without accusing anyone by name, the business models seen in this sector are well known: advertising inserted into the experience, exploitation or resale of browsing data, throttled bandwidth to push users toward a paid tier, or reselling the users' own connections. When the product is a pipe your entire browsing goes through, "free" rarely means the same thing as it does on an honest price list.

Another kind of VPN: a private network between your machines

VIGIL-MESH goes back to the original meaning of VPN: a virtual private network. It links your machines — the PC at home, the NAS, the cameras, the laptop on the road — into a closed, encrypted network, as if they were plugged into the same switch. Traffic goes directly from one machine to another, peer to peer, with no detour through a central server.

Why this free plan hides nothing

The difference comes from the architecture. In an anonymization VPN, every byte transits through the service's servers: each free user costs bandwidth. In a mesh VPN, direct peer-to-peer traffic goes from one of your machines to another without ever touching VIGIL-MESH's infrastructure — so it costs the service nothing. Only relayed traffic, used when the direct path is not available, has a real cost.

The free plan follows from that reality, with no tricks: up to 5 devices, unlimited direct traffic, and 30 GB of relayed traffic included per device per month (€1 per GB beyond that). The service’s business model is the Pro subscription, at €1.99 per month — not advertising, not your data.

What you actually do with the free plan

A free VPN for remote access to your own PC — that is the typical use case. Clients exist for Windows, Linux, Android, Jetson — and even the browser, thanks to a WASM core that opens an SSH terminal or an RDP desktop in a plain tab.

• Access your PC remotely — remote desktop, files, terminal, from anywhere, without exposing anything on the Internet.
• Reach your cameras and NAS — as if you were at home, through an encrypted tunnel instead of an open port on the router.
• Play LAN games remotely — local broadcast crosses the mesh, and LAN game lobbies are discovered as if on a single segment.
• SSH and RDP from the browser — a tab is enough, even on a machine with nothing installed.

Classic free VPN vs free mesh VPN

Frequently asked questions