What an Independent VPN Actually Is — and Why Almost None Exist
“Independent” is the most abused word in VPN marketing. Here is a working definition, a list of the things that disqualify a provider, the reasons independence is rare, and a five-minute way to check any VPN you are considering.
In short: An independent VPN is one whose owner is a named person or small company with no parent corporation, no holding company, no outside investors and no side business in data. The reason that matters is simple: whoever owns the VPN owns the servers your traffic passes through, and their incentives become your privacy policy. By that definition, most of the VPNs you have heard of are not independent, because two corporate groups own the majority of the market — and many of the review sites that rank them.
What does "independent VPN" mean?
The word gets attached to almost every VPN at some point, so it helps to be precise. A VPN is independent when all of the following are true:
- — The owner is disclosed, by name, on the provider's own site — not discoverable only through a corporate registry
- — There is no parent corporation or holding company above that owner
- — There are no outside investors whose return depends on the company's growth or eventual sale
- — Revenue comes from users, through subscriptions, and not from advertising, data or "partnerships"
- — The company does not own or fund review sites that recommend it
Note what is not on the list. Independence is not about being small, or new, or open source, or based in a particular country. A large company can be independent. A tiny one can be a subsidiary. It is purely a question of who is above the company and what they want from it.
Why does ownership matter more than the privacy policy?
A privacy policy is a promise. Ownership is a structure. Promises can be rewritten with a changelog entry; structures decide what the company is under pressure to do.
Consider what happens when a VPN is acquired by a holding company. The acquirer paid a large sum and needs a return. The VPN's revenue is subscriptions, so the levers are: raise prices, cut infrastructure costs, cross-sell other products, or find a use for the one asset a VPN accumulates whether it wants to or not — knowledge of what a lot of people do online. The no-logs policy that existed at acquisition may survive. The incentive to keep it does not.
You are not trusting a privacy policy. You are trusting the people who can change it, and the people who can pressure them.
This is why a VPN's ownership page tells you more than its feature list. If it does not have one, that is also information.
Who actually owns the VPN market?
The consumer VPN industry consolidated hard between 2017 and 2022. Two groups came out on top:
Kape Technologies
Formerly Crossrider, a company that UC Berkeley researchers and Google flagged for distributing ad-injection software. After rebranding in 2018 it bought CyberGhost, ZenMate, Private Internet Access and, in 2021, ExpressVPN for $936 million. It also owns the review sites vpnMentor and Wizcase, which rank its own products. In 2023 it was taken private.
Nord Security
The company behind NordVPN merged with Surfshark in 2022. The merger was not shown on either product's homepage at the time, and the two brands continued to be marketed as competitors. Nord Security also owned Atlas VPN, which it acquired in 2021 and folded into NordVPN in 2024.
Together, these two groups control the majority of paid VPN subscriptions in the West, and a large share of the "best VPN" search results that send people to them. The full map is in Who Owns Your VPN?.
Why are independent VPNs so rare?
Three reasons, and none of them is a conspiracy.
1. Customer acquisition is expensive
A VPN subscription sells for a few dollars a month. Ranking for "best VPN" costs far more than that per click. The providers who can afford it are the ones with corporate balance sheets, which is how the market ends up dominated by the groups above. An independent provider cannot outbid them, so it has to grow on word of mouth, which is slow.
2. The exit is the business model
For a venture-funded VPN, the plan from day one is to be acquired. Independence is a phase, not a principle. Several VPNs that marketed themselves as independent were, in fact, independent — right up until the purchase closed.
3. "Free" VPNs are funded by the thing a VPN is supposed to protect
A free VPN with millions of users has server bills. Someone pays them. The most common answers are advertising inside the app, selling aggregated traffic data, or bundling the users into a residential proxy network that resells their bandwidth. None of those is compatible with independence, because each one creates a customer whose interests run against the user's.
How to check whether a VPN is independent
This takes about five minutes and does not require trusting anyone's marketing.
- — Find the ownership page. Search the provider's site for "owner," "parent company" or "about." If the answer is a brand name rather than a legal entity and a person, keep digging
- — Search the corporate registry. Most jurisdictions publish company records. Look up the legal entity and see who the directors and shareholders are
- — Check for a warrant canary. A regularly updated statement that the provider has not received secret government requests. Its absence is not proof of anything; its presence, and its update history, is
- — Look for investors. Search the company name with "raises," "Series A" or "acquired." Press releases about funding rounds are not hidden
- — Ask how it makes money. If the answer is not "subscriptions" in one word, find out what the other words are
- — Check who recommends it. Look up the ownership of the review site that ranked it first. If the same group owns both, the ranking is an advertisement
A fuller version of this is in our 10-point trust checklist.
Is PlanckVPN independent?
Yes, by the definition above, and you can check every claim rather than take our word for it. PlanckVPN is owned by its founder, Kuzzat Altay, and incorporated in Virginia, United States. There is no parent corporation, no holding company and no outside investor. It is funded by one paid subscription — there is no free tier, because a free tier would need to be funded by something else. It does not own or pay review sites. The ownership, the warrant canary and the infrastructure details are published at planckvpn.com/transparency, and the founder has committed publicly that the company will not be sold to a data company or holding corporation.
We are also small, and we will say plainly what that costs you: fewer server locations than the corporate providers, no 24-hour live chat, and no marketing budget to put us at the top of a review site. If those matter more to you than ownership, the comparison page says so honestly, including the categories where we lose.
The short version
An independent VPN has a named owner, no parent, no investors and no data business. Almost none of the well-known providers qualify, because the market consolidated under two corporate groups that also own the review sites. Independence is rare because acquisition is the business model and customer acquisition is expensive. You can verify any provider's status in five minutes using the corporate registry, the funding press and the ownership of whoever recommended it. Do that before you route your traffic through their servers.
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