Affiliate disclosure
Do you get paid for this?
KotoVPN earns affiliate commission from every provider it covers. There are four, all disclosed, and the relationship is stated next to every outbound link. Commission is not an input to the scoring rubric, which is why the provider ranked last pays us on the same terms as the one ranked first.
Every provider we cover, and what we earn from it
| Provider | Score | Commercial relationship |
|---|---|---|
| Proton VPN | 90.0 | Affiliate commission |
| NordVPN | 84.0 | Affiliate commission |
| PureVPN | 70.0 | Affiliate commission |
| FastestVPN | 55.0 | Affiliate commission |
The conflict, stated plainly
We earn commission from all 4 providers on this site. That is a conflict of interest, it is not unusual in this category, and the useful thing is not to deny it but to say what constrains it.
What constrains it here is that scores are arithmetic rather than assertion. Seven criteria, published weights, one written reason per score stating a checkable fact. Commission is not one of the inputs and there is no step after the calculation where a total gets adjusted.
The visible consequence: FastestVPN pays us on the same terms as the others and finishes last at 55.0 out of 100, with “one published audit, from January 2023, never repeated” printed in its scoring table. That is the kind of thing a site optimising purely for revenue leaves out.
What we are not claiming: that this is an independent survey of the VPN market. It is not. There are providers with stronger privacy postures than anything listed here — Mullvad and IVPN among them — that we do not cover because we have no relationship with them. If you are choosing on privacy alone, you should look beyond this site, and we would rather say so than let the ranking imply otherwise.
How the links work
Outbound links go through /go/{provider}/, which is excluded from search indexing, disallowed in robots.txt, and marked rel="sponsored nofollow". It is the only place tracking parameters are applied, so an affiliate link can change without touching a single page.
Every call to action on this site states that it is a commercial link in the sentence directly beneath it. You never have to reach this page to find out.
What we do not do
- Accept payment for a review, a position, or a higher score
- Accept payment to remove or soften a criticism
- Publish sponsored posts presented as editorial
- Change a score because a provider objects, unless they show the fact is wrong
- Accept free subscriptions in exchange for coverage
If a provider disputes something, the route is the same as for any reader: show us the source. A corrected fact changes the score through the rubric, in whichever direction the fact points, and the change is logged on the corrections page.
Prices and offers
Prices carry the date they were checked and a link to the page they came from. Promotional rates change constantly and renewal pricing is usually well above the introductory term. The provider’s own checkout is the only authority on what you will actually pay.
Questions
Anything unclear here: editor@kotovpn.online.