VPN provider makes splash with lifetime subscription on free password manager

(Image credit: FastestVPN)

It may not be on our list of the best VPN providers, but FastestVPN will get heads turning thanks to its latest plan.

This includes a 12-month subscription to Passhulk, a potential candidate for our best password manager list, worth $23.95, and a 1-month subscription to Internxt - which is definitely in our best cloud storage guide - and is worth a mere $8.99 per month.

Oh and it’s worth noting that FastestVPN’s own subscription lasts a lifetime (or however long FastestVPN will operate) and costs a mere $20 with a 15-day money back guarantee. In comparison, our best cheap VPN provider, Surfshark costs $2.30 per month while PIA, another strong contender, has a monthly outlay of $2.16.

Is it worth it?

We have been - ironically - lifelong critics of lifetime subscriptions because we don’t believe that business model is sustainable in the long run, especially in this day and age of rising energy costs. A VPN service needs servers and these servers - often from dedicated server hosting providers - cost money to run, a lot of money. Add the development costs for multiple platforms, maintenance costs, marketing costs and tech support and your capital expenditure as a business must run in the tens of thousands of dollars a month.

When we approached FastestVPN with our concerns, they told us that “We are in the market penetration stage and for branding purposes, we are bearing the cost. The idea is to acquire the customers first and when the community gets satisfied with the consistent performance of FastestVPN we will discontinue the Lifetime plan and switch to the recurring model plans. But for those who have purchased the Lifetime plan, we will not terminate their accounts, they will have the subscription for life. We have revamped our product 3rd time and are continuously working hard to build our product great.”

As for the other bundled products, we haven’t reviewed Passhulk yet and while it is a minnow compared to more established players like Dashlane, LastPass or Bitwarden, at least on paper, it ticks the right boxes with unlimited password saving and 24/7 live support. Bear in mind though that they’ve been in the business for less than a year.

On the other hand, Internxt is a much better known service provider but we’d prefer a free 20GB annual subscription instead. You don’t want to upload 2TB of data to one provider in 30 days and then having to recover them should you decide to not to go ahead with the subscription.

Désiré has been musing and writing about technology during a career spanning four decades. He dabbled in website builders and web hosting when DHTML and frames were in vogue and started narrating about the impact of technology on society just before the start of the Y2K hysteria at the turn of the last millennium.