- Free allowance
- No free tier. Buy page 2026-11-04: 1 Month $11.95 per month; 1 Year $3.99 per month billed at $47.88 first year, then renews annually at $47.88; 3 Years + 4 Months $2.03 per month, autorenews at $81.20 every 3 years.
- Verdict
- paidno free allowance; listed for its price
- Cost
- USD 2.03/monthparsed from the record, in USD
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- retention-clampeda bound port is deleted if the bind is not renewed: Call /bindPort every 15 minutes, or the port will be deleted. The port signature is valid for two months: All ports currently expire after 2 months.
- Evidence
- documented11 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-05checked 2026-11-04 (live); stale on 2026-12-05
| Free tier | No free tier. Buy page 2026-11-04: 1 Month $11.95 per month; 1 Year $3.99 per month billed at $47.88 first year, then renews annually at $47.88; 3 Years + 4 Months $2.03 per month, autorenews at $81.20 every 3 years. unit none; metered on none |
|---|
| Price | USD 11.95 per month; USD 3.99 per month on 1 year (USD 47.88 first year, renewing at USD 47.88); USD 2.03 per month on 3 Years + 4 Months, autorenewing at USD 81.20 every 3 years |
|---|
| Limits | - retention-clamped (binding) a bound port is deleted if the bind is not renewed: Call /bindPort every 15 minutes, or the port will be deleted. The port signature is valid for two months: All ports currently expire after 2 months. source
- write-gated port forwarding is disabled server side in the United States: Port Forwarding is disabled on server-side in the United States. source
|
|---|
| Binding | retention-clamped No byte cap is stated, so the binding constraint is the 15-minute bind renewal: the port exists only while a loop keeps re-signing it. That is the same class of failure as Proton's lease but with a 900-second period instead of 60. |
|---|
| Identity | email An account with credentials used by the scripts as PIA_USER and PIA_PASS; payment by card or PayPal. |
|---|
| Egress | unverified for a byte figure: the buy page states Unlimited Device Security but no page read states a traffic allowance. PIA is widely described as unmetered, which did not confirm from a vendor sentence.; ingress: tcp+udp free allowance: none published |
|---|
| Interface | cli, rest Token and port are HTTP calls to the connected gateway on port 19999 (/getSignature, /bindPort); the scripts wrap them. |
|---|
| Tooling | pia-foss manual-connections scripts with wg-quick and curl/jq, or the official app. Protocols: WireGuard and OpenVPN with UDP or TCP transport, or Automatic. A SOCKS5 proxy with separate credentials and a Shadowsocks proxy (obfuscation) are offered through the Multi-Hop setting. P2P traffic is supported on all server locations. |
|---|
| Composes with | A token endpoint plus a bind loop is a five-line cron job on a free VM; the VM then holds a stable public UDP endpoint for the life of the signature. |
|---|
| Reliability | Losing the 15-minute renewal loop silently drops the port mapping while the tunnel stays up. United States servers cannot forward at all. |
|---|
| Notes | The GitHub route was used instead. The port number itself is stable for the life of the signature, which is the property Proton lacks. |
|---|
| Evidence note | documented Measured would need a token, a bound port, a live UDP request through it and a byte count. The 15-minute and 2-month sentences are in the vendor's own repository README, read. |
|---|
| Parsed numbers | - has-free-tier 0
- retention-clamped 15 minutes
- price USD 2.03 / month
|
|---|