About KotoVPN
What is KotoVPN?
KotoVPN scores four VPN providers against seven weighted criteria, with every input sourced, dated and given a written reason. It earns affiliate commission from all four, which is disclosed on every page. It is not a survey of the VPN market and does not present itself as one.
A VPN review site built on one rule: every number has to be reconstructible by the reader.
The problem this exists for
Search for a VPN and you get pages of scores with no arithmetic behind them. A provider is 9.8 out of 10; another is 9.6. Nobody explains what separates them, and the ordering correlates suspiciously well with commission rates. The scores are not calculated, they are asserted.
KotoVPN publishes the rubric first. Seven criteria, fixed weights, one written reason per score stating a checkable fact. If you disagree with a weighting, the inputs are all on the page and you can redo the sum.
What we cover, and what we do not
4 providers, in English only. Both limits are deliberate. A site that publishes the same page in twenty machine-translated languages is not serving twenty audiences, it is filling an index.
The more important limit is the provider list. We earn commission from all 4 services covered here, disclosed on every page. This is not a survey of the VPN market, and providers with stronger privacy postures exist that we do not cover because we have no relationship with them. Saying that out loud costs us nothing we would want to keep.
What we refuse to publish
- A speed figure nobody measured
- A claim that a provider works with a named streaming catalogue, which changes weekly
- A rating with no stated inputs
- A “no logs verified” claim, because nobody outside the company can verify it
- A page generated purely because a keyword permutation exists
How to check us
- Open any review. Multiply each raw score by its weight, divide by ten, add the seven results. You should get the number in the heading.
- Open the evidence table. Every row links to the page the fact came from and the date we read it.
- Check whether the criticism survives the commission. We earn from every provider here, so the test is whether the lowest-scoring one still has its weakest fact — one audit, January 2023, never repeated — printed in its own scoring table. It does.
Where we are weak
Being honest about the rubric means being honest about its limits. Right now the scores rest entirely on documented facts, because our own measurements do not exist yet — the lab is empty and says so. Facts also drift: a price checked last month may be wrong today, and an audit can be superseded. Everything carries a checked date for that reason, and the corrections page logs what we got wrong.
How we are funded
Affiliate commission on some outbound links, disclosed per provider and per link. No sponsored posts, no paid placements, no payment for a score. The disclosure page names every provider that pays and every one that does not.
Contact
Corrections, disputes and questions: the contact page.