VPN Unlimited review Australia

While many virtual private network (VPN) services are content to battle over monthly, annual and multi-year pricing, VPN Unlimited does things differently with a rare lifetime subscription. Admittedly, it carries a steep initial asking price, which looms larger when you consider that you may be locking yourself in for a VPN that’s light on certain features.

When I first reviewed VPN Unlimited in 2020, I liked how easy it was to use, while enjoying the international streaming and speedy single Australian location. Fast-forward to more recent times, and there’s still only one Australian location with not a lot in the way of international choices, either. As for the rest of how VPN Unlimited fares in recent times, scroll on.

VPN Unlimited plan pricing effective as of publishing. Offers and availability vary by location and are subject to change.

If you want a VPN with a lifetime subscription, your choices are to wait for a flash sale or go with VPN Unlimited. Whether you pay for a month, year or a lifetime subscription, VPN Unlimited is easy to use with fast speeds and decent streaming results. The catch is that it’s light on features and operating on a small global network with an unnecessarily restrictive limit of five simultaneous devices.

[text block] While the big selling point is a lifetime subscription, VPN Unlimited also offers monthly and annual pricing. The US$9.99 monthly pricing ranks in the top three of the 17 VPNs I’ve reviewed, just behind Windscribe VPN and Mullvad VPN. Annual pricing isn’t so flash (US$59.99), but still comfortably makes it into the top 10.

The VPN Unlimited lifetime subscription is a pricey initial investment at US$199.99, but it’s regularly on sale for US$99.99, which you should absolutely wait for if you want a lifetime VPN subscription (it’s what I did). Even at the full asking price, the VPN Unlimited lifetime subscription is the best multi-year value of the VPNs I’ve reviewed. There’s also a seven-day trial of the full service.

VPN Unlimited is a bit all over the place with its connectivity and user experience. For starters, there’s a very user-friendly onboarding process, which is great for first-time VPNers. That easy-to-use motif carries over to everyday use, with a giant connection/disconnection button, global map of server locations and a few simple clicks to switch servers.

Admittedly, VPN Unlimited has a comparatively tiny server network, smaller even than the sub-1,000 options of Mullvad. At the time of writing, VPN Unlimited claimed to have 400+ servers which, by my count, were in 57 countries with 69 total location choices. For comparison, ExpressVPN offers 3,000+ servers in 113 countries and 151 locations. While the number of servers isn’t the be-all and end-all of a VPN, it does make for better reliability and, in my experience, superior sidestepping of international geoblocks.

Connecting to servers is easy enough but it’s also slow with VPN Unlimited’s automatically selected VPN protocol. Connection times ranged hung around seven seconds, while disconnecting took under a second. If you’re seeking to use VPN Unlimited for privacy and security in Australia, the fastest option is to connect to the Sydney location. But that’s also the only location choice for Australia, which is disappointing for anyone outside of New South Wales.

During my tests, VPN Unlimited encountered various errors on my Windows 11 test machine. These problems ranged from issues loading websites to multiple interruptions to live music streaming while switching servers. Overall, VPN Unlimited is very easy to use albeit with a limited server network.

VPN Unlimited allows for five simultaneous connections on up to five devices. Typically, I don’t add the disclaimer about devices because most VPNs outside of Hotspot Shield VPN don’t have a device limit. But VPN Unlimited does. Effectively, once you’ve installed VPN Unlimited on five devices, you have to start manually removing one or more to install it on others.

This is a frustrating and limiting extra step, more so when you’ve removed more than five devices and have a one-device-per-day limit placed on your account. VPN Unlimited is available for the following more-than-five platforms:

• MacOS
• Windows
• Android
• iOS
• Linux
• Google Chrome
• Mozilla Firefox
• Opera
• Microsoft Edge

VPN Unlimited also supports eligible routers, network-attached streaming (NAS) drives and streaming devices like the Nvidia Shield TV Pro.

Unless your internet provider is throttling your speeds, connecting to a VPN service will impact your latency and download/upload speeds. To highlight this, the table below shows the midday speeds for VPN Unlimited with an Aussie Broadband100/40Mbps FTTC connection.

On the whole, those are some impressive speed test results for VPN Unlimited. Download speeds, in particular, are fantastic, including a very acceptable 20% hit to download speeds for the automatically selected UK server. Upload speeds are decent albeit not amazing, but the latencies for a Sydney-to-Sydney connection and to Los Angeles are both gold-medal compared to VPN Unlimited’s peers.

For context, VPN Unlimited leapt from 12th to third for overall speed compared to the other VPNs I’ve reviewed. More specifically, it jumped from 10th to first for download speeds and from 9th to 6th for upload speeds. Under the right conditions and despite a limited server network, VPN Unlimited offers impressively speedy results.

For those who don’t mind running the risk of having their streaming services blocked or banned, a VPN can be used to stream content from geoblocked libraries overseas. A VPN that’s great for streaming should work across popular US, UK and Australian streaming services, loading content libraries in a timely way while buffering content quickly and without errors.

In terms of the table below, buffering speeds are rated accordingly:

• Fast (1–5 seconds)
• Moderate (5–15 seconds)
• Slow (15–25 seconds)
• Extremely slow (slower than 25 seconds)

When it works with a streaming service, VPN Unlimited is a great streaming companion, offering fast buffering for Stan, HBO Max, Hulu, Peacock and the US Netflix library. Admittedly, there was some location and server switching required to score these speedy streaming wins.

Certain US locations didn’t work with any services, while others only worked with one or two. VPN Unlimited does have specialty streaming servers—Hulu, HBO Now and Netflix to name a few—and the US ones did sometimes work with more than the service they’re built for. That said, despite offering a BBC iPlayer speciality server, I was unable to get any BBC iPlayer content to play, even when I tested with the regular UK location options.

The table below gives you an idea of how VPN Unlimited might work with your NBN connection. It uses the max potential download speeds for any given connection to give you an idea of how the best-case 13% download speed change for the nearest US location (California) might impact your overall download speed when using VPN Unlimited. Normally, the table would include BBC iPlayer information, but I’ve removed that as VPN Unlimited was unable to stream content from that service in my tests.

The two columns on the right offer the number of simultaneous streams per connection. While Netflix has a maximum of four simultaneous streams per 4K account, Hulu has an add-on for unlimited streams. We know these stream numbers get ridiculous for beyond-NBN 100 plans, but they’re a good indication of speed degradation.

If you want an easy-to-use service with great speeds and decent streaming results, VPN Unlimited is a good choice. That said, the limitations to the numbers that matter—simultaneous connections/devices, servers and location choices—coupled with a lack of extra features make the overall value of a lifetime subscription tarnished somewhat in comparison to VPN Unlimited’s competitors that excel in those areas.