Do You Actually Need a VPN? An Honest Answer From a VPN Company

We are a VPN company. We make money when people use our product. So you should weigh what we say here against that incentive. With that disclosed, here is the honest answer: you probably do not need a VPN as often as VPN marketing suggests, but there are specific situations where one genuinely matters.

What most VPN marketing gets wrong

Open any VPN company's homepage and you will see some version of this: "Hackers are stealing your data. Your ISP is watching everything. Public Wi-Fi is a death trap. You need a VPN to stay safe online."

This is overstated. Here is what is actually true in 2026:

• — Most of the internet is already encrypted. Over 95% of web traffic now uses HTTPS. That means the content of your browsing — what you type, what you read, your passwords, your bank transactions — is encrypted between your browser and the website. Your ISP cannot read it. A hacker on public Wi-Fi cannot read it. A VPN does not add encryption to traffic that is already encrypted.
• — Public Wi-Fi is not the emergency it was in 2012. The "public Wi-Fi is dangerous" narrative comes from an era before HTTPS was widespread. Today, connecting to airport Wi-Fi and checking your email is not the security crisis VPN companies suggest. Your email provider uses TLS. Your bank uses HTTPS. The traffic is encrypted regardless of the network.
• — A VPN does not make you anonymous. Your browser fingerprint, cookies, logged-in accounts, and behavior patterns identify you far more reliably than your IP address. A VPN hides your IP from the sites you visit, but if you are logged into Google, Google still knows it is you.

If a VPN company tells you that you are in danger every time you go online without their product, they are selling fear, not facts.

When you probably do not need a VPN

For most everyday internet use in a country with strong legal protections, a VPN adds very little practical security:

• — Browsing HTTPS websites from your home network
• — Checking email through a major provider (Gmail, Outlook, ProtonMail)
• — Online banking (your bank uses its own encryption)
• — Using messaging apps with end-to-end encryption (Signal, iMessage, WhatsApp)
• — Shopping on major e-commerce sites

In these scenarios, HTTPS and TLS are already protecting the content of your communication. A VPN adds a layer on top, but the marginal security benefit is small.

When a VPN genuinely matters

There are real situations where a VPN provides meaningful protection that you cannot get any other way:

1. Hiding your browsing from your ISP

HTTPS encrypts the content of your traffic, but your ISP can still see which websites you visit. They see the domain names. They see the DNS queries. They know you visited a specific health information site, a political forum, or a job search platform — even if they cannot see what you did there.

In the United States, ISPs are legally permitted to collect and sell this browsing metadata. A VPN prevents your ISP from seeing which domains you connect to. This is not a hypothetical threat. It is current law.

2. Circumventing censorship

If you live in or are traveling through a country that blocks access to parts of the internet — China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and others — a VPN is not a convenience. It is a necessity. It is the difference between having access to independent news and not having it. Between being able to communicate freely and being monitored.

I know this personally. I grew up in a country where the internet was censored. A VPN — or more precisely, the software on a CD I found on a staircase — gave me access to the free world's internet. That experience is why PlanckVPN exists. You can read the full story here.

3. Protecting yourself on untrusted networks

While HTTPS handles most threats on public Wi-Fi, there are edge cases. Some older apps may not use proper encryption. DNS queries may be sent in plaintext. A VPN wraps all of your device's traffic — including DNS — in an encrypted tunnel, eliminating these gaps entirely.

This matters most when you are on a network you do not control and cannot verify — a hotel, a conference, an unfamiliar country's cellular network.

4. Preventing IP-based tracking and profiling

Your IP address is one data point among many that companies use to build a profile of you. It reveals your approximate location and your ISP. Some websites use it to adjust pricing. Some advertisers use it for targeting. A VPN replaces your real IP with the VPN server's IP, removing this one data point from the equation.

This is not anonymity. But it is one less piece of information about you in circulation.

5. Avoiding price discrimination

Some services — flights, hotels, software subscriptions — show different prices based on your location. A VPN lets you see prices from different regions. This is a practical benefit, not a security one, but it is real and it is legitimate.

The honest summary

A VPN is not a security emergency button. It is a privacy tool with specific, well-defined use cases. The most important of those use cases — hiding your browsing metadata from your ISP and circumventing censorship — are genuinely valuable. The rest of what VPN marketing claims is mostly noise.

If you are in a country with internet censorship, you need a VPN. If you care about your ISP collecting and selling your browsing metadata, a VPN helps. If you are on untrusted networks frequently, a VPN closes some real gaps. If you are sitting at home browsing HTTPS websites, a VPN is adding marginal value at best.

We would rather you understand this clearly and choose to use PlanckVPN for the right reasons than sign up because we scared you into it.

If you do decide you need one

If you have read this far and decided a VPN is worth using, the next question is which one. We have a comparison page where we show exactly how PlanckVPN stacks up against NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and Proton VPN — including the categories where we lose.

We also have a transparency page where we disclose our ownership, our warrant canary, and exactly how we make money. If you are going to trust a company with your traffic, you should know who they are.

Sources

• — US Congress — S.J.Res.34: Disapproval of FCC broadband privacy rules (2017)