Flow VPN Review

Disappointingly, Flow does log some user data, which is concerning for any security-conscious users. Moreover, FlowVPN is owned by Portable Limited, a company based and registered in Warwick, United Kingdom. Portable Ltd. also owns UK VPN and Global VPN, and the fact it is based in the UK means the company has to follow British data-logging law.

If you are concerned about your privacy and anonymity online, we recommend looking at a VPN service such as ExpressVPN or NordVPN, which come with transparent, independently audited no-logs policies. This means that you do not have to worry about the provider ever storing, sharing, or misusing your private activity data.

Flow VPN's service operates on bank-grade 128-bit encryption to protect your data. However, it is necessary to note that most premium VPNs utilize stronger, military-grade AES-256 bit encryption as standard. There is a NAT firewall in place to prevent unwanted incoming traffic and support for secure OpenVPN, PPTP, L2TP, IKEv2, SSL, and Flow TCP protocols.

On the Flow VPN Mac and iPhone clients, the VPN also utilizes SSH tunneling that re-routes your web traffic through the SSH protocol to offer secure, firewall-friendly internet connections. However, Flow VPN does not offer optimization for torrenting clients such as BitTorrent due to the risk of legal action should it be used for such activities.

The provider's Terms and Conditions state that the VPN monitors and stores some of the information sent across its network during everyday use of the service. The data is collected to monitor the load on each server to enable the provider to plan capacity and enhance its services, allow users to view their recent server connections in the app, and monitor abuse of the service.

The information stored by Flow VPN includes IP addresses, session information, allocated IPs, connection date and time stamps, connection duration, and authentication requests which is significantly more than most other VPNs collect. The fact that Flow VPN does keep logs of such a considerable amount of personal data is worrying. Until Flow VPN completes an independent audit of its network and services, it is also impossible to tell whether the VPN stores even more information than this.

Flow VPN is a reliable service, and it performs relatively well for simple web activities like browsing. However, there is no support for torrenting, which is disappointing for fans of P2P sharing. It does not offer access to geo-restricted streaming services like Netflix or Amazon Prime Video either.

There are well-designed, simple clients for the most popular operating systems, with manual setup guides for an additional range of devices. However, Flow VPN offers a relatively small range of features and much less than some of the best VPNs on the market. Every Flow VPN plan, except the monthly plan, is accompanied by a free trial, so you can test the VPN on your device before committing to a paid plan.

The service delivers a network of over 100 servers located in 60 countries, including the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, and Hong Kong.

There are three subscription options with Flow VPN. Flow VPN comes in at $5.99 a month on the monthly rolling contract, which is significantly less than the industry average. If you commit to the quarterly option with the service, you'll be paying $4.99 a month, and on the annual plan, the price drops to $3.33 a month. Despite that $3.99 may still be affordable, it is slightly more than the best affordable VPNs like Surfshark.

A single subscription with Flow VPN enables protection for up to 4 devices simultaneously, slightly less than the industry average of 5. This makes Flow VPN much less cost-effective than Surfshark, a service that comes in at less than $2.50 a month but offers a generous unlimited simultaneous connections policy, meaning that you can use your subscription across all of your devices and, in theory, share it with your friends and family too.

There is no money-back guarantee with Flow VPN, which is disappointing considering that the industry average is a 30-day money-back guarantee and many providers even offer more than that. The VPN company states that refund requests are made at the discretion of the Flow VPN support team and will require investigations.

There is a decent range of payment options, including credit cards, debit cards, PayPal, Paymentwall, Stripe, UnionPay, and AliPay. However, there's no support for Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, which is disappointing for any security-conscious users that wish to remain completely anonymous online.