Why your lifetime VPN plan might not be safe

When you sign up to a VPN, you typically have the option to pay monthly or get a tasty discount for paying for a year or more in advance. Some VPNs have gone further, offering lifetime deals, but as it turns out, you can't really trust these to last that long. Perhaps they weren't referring to human lifetimes after all, or maybe they thought most people only lived a few years.

VPN Secure is a VPN service that has been swimming beneath the mainstream for some years. You wouldn't find it in a list of the best VPNs, let's put it that way. At one point, it offered lifetime deals… but recently, these have been cancelled. It turns out that VPN Secure has been bought out, and its new owner, InfiniteQuant Ltd, didn't know it had users who had paid to use the service indefinitely.

It seems hard to believe, doesn't it? While you probably wouldn't have been using VPN Secure as a gaming VPN, it would have been fine for basic encryption and privacy online… but how did a company spend money buying a VPN business without spotting that it had a significant proportion of users who weren't paying?

A report in The Register includes an interview with InfiniteQuant Ltd CEO Romain Brabant, who explained the cancellation, which dropped into lifetime users' inboxes in April. "The technical debt and server costs associated with supporting a legacy promise made many years ago became unsustainable for a modern VPN infrastructure," he said.

There is perhaps an argument supporting this. Certainly, it seems that some lifetime plans for VPN Secure were available for as little as $27.99. As a point of comparison, you can sign up to a premium service like NordVPN and get a year's coverage for $50, so that price is extremely generous.

But InfiniteQuant Ltd has also claimed that its deal for VPN Secure from Australian company BoostNetwork Pty Ltd was "asset-only" and didn't include the liabilities. Apparently, in performing due diligence ahead of the purchase, "nowhere in the listing, profit and loss statement, or communication was there any mention of lifetime deals."

This is yet another valuable lesson about sticking to well known and highly regarded VPNs like NordVPN and ExpressVPN. You're getting reliable service, usable client apps, and good customer service, along with affordable, realistic pricing.

If you already have a lifetime VPN deal, it's probably time to think again. In many cases, these are fire-and-forget services, with the operators typically offering poor customer service, limited or outdated security and features, and questionable reliability. Even if you think it's a good deal, it probably isn't.

Check out our Warzone VPN and Minecraft VPN guides if you want an insight on how to use these services to enhance your gaming experience.