Weak

AirVPN

Commercial VPNItalyRank 4 of 68

Paying monthly

$8.11 per month

Paying yearly

$56.74 billed once a year

Coverage

23 countries with an exit

Free tier

No paid plans only

37 out of 100

Security

57 out of 100

Usability

Visit site

Service class

Commercial VPN — security leads

Security score

37 of 100 · Weak

Usability score

57 of 100 · state known · 100% established · 100.0% of the weight read

Legal entity

AirVPN di Paolo Brini — Via Sagittario 4, Perugia (PG), Italy. VAT ID IT03297800546, REA PG-279011 (individual/sole-proprietor enterprise)

Jurisdiction

Italy

Ultimate owner

Paolo Brini, sole owner/operator trading as 'AirVPN di Paolo Brini'. The service began in 2010 as a project of a small group of Rome-based activists/hacktivists (initially operated by a company called Iridium), and was formalized under a dedicated company with Brini as owner in November 2012.

Exposure

Medium · dominant channel: retention

Retention

Nothing that links traffic to a person

Latest audit

not applicable · not applicable · not applicable · unknown

Countries with exits

Protocols

WireGuard OpenVPN An obfuscated protocol

Works under active censorship

Claimed to work

Weakest protocol still offered

not applicable

Own DNS inside the tunnel

Yes, on the provider's word

Platforms

Android Android TV Fire TV iOS Linux macOS Routers Windows

Simultaneous devices

Kill switch

On some platforms

Split tunnelling

Not available

Signing up

No account needed

Free tier

No free tier

P2P allowed

Allowed

Major streaming services reachable

Not reachable

Price, monthly

$8.11 per month

Price, yearly

$56.74 a year at renewal, billed once

Offered countries that sit under a logging mandateC09_mandate_countries

Country of the ultimate beneficial ownerM11_owner_jurisdiction

Owner group cluster keyM15_owner_group

independent

Date the current owner took controlM16_control_since

not applicable

Role of this brand inside the groupM17_brand_role

principal

Infrastructure shared with cluster siblingsM18_shared_infrastructure

separate

Total published auditsV10_audit_count

Where the security score comes from

Eight channels, each asking one question of the published record and reading a named set of fields to answer it. They multiply rather than add — the factor beside a channel is what is left after the pressure it found, and open a channel to see every field it read, as it is stored. How the model works

Security fields

67 55 of them feed a channel

Established

43 8 left unknown, 16 not applicable

Completeness

82% the share the model could weigh

Citations

55 across 16 documents

Every value carries what it rests on, and the model weighs the four levels differently. Weight, then how many citations on this record sit at that level:

B weighs 0.85 · 38 hereC weighs 0.70 · 17 here

The weights are methodology.json’s own; a claim seen in the artefact itself counts for more than the same claim reported second-hand. The date at the end of a row is the day that value was last read.

A channel does not price every field it reads. The ones it did are marked along their edge and carry what they added; everything else was read and cost nothing. Only a channel that composes field by field can mark a field at all — the rest price themselves by the parameters printed above their rows.

Still open on this record.

Retention, unchecked by anyone. No independent audit has ever been commissioned (V01=no, based on consensus among reviewers and the absence of any AirVPN announcement of one, rather than a primary AirVPN denial) — retention (C01) rests entirely on the provider's own privacy notice, never checked by an outside party.

No transparency report, no canary. No transparency report of government/legal requests and no warrant canary could be found on airvpn.org (P05, P07 unknown) — the site does publish periodic 'mission' reports, but those cover donations to NGOs, not law-enforcement requests, so they do not establish P05.

the rest of what is open — 289 more words

What the forum threads show. Forum threads show users repeatedly asking AirVPN for a warrant canary with no confirmation from staff that one exists, which is suggestive but not a primary denial, so P07 stays unknown rather than 'none'.

Counts nobody publishes. Request/data-handover counts are consequently also unknown (P08, P09), and total subscriber count is never disclosed (M08 unknown) — AirVPN publishes only a live concurrently-connected-users counter, not a registered-user or subscriber total, so silence/ignorance carry real weight here.

Builds and pentests. Reproducible builds are not documented on AirVPN's own build-from-source page (eddie.website/support/build/), and no dedicated client/infrastructure pentest could be found (V13, V14 unknown). Kill switch scope and split-tunneling behaviour are sourced to a third-party review rather than AirVPN's own documentation (U08, U09 at confidence C) because the relevant FAQ pages could not be reached directly through the site's routing (they render via JavaScript and returned only a loading shell to a plain fetch).

Coverage outside the affiliates. Press coverage is not affiliate-only: BleepingComputer, a mainstream outlet outside the affiliate-aggregator list, has published an independent review carrying its own affiliate-disclosure notice rather than being confined to affiliate directories (X08=no). Its same review also found AirVPN failed every streaming service it tried — Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, ABC, NBC, CBS — which is why U12b_streaming_works now reads no rather than the addictivetips.com-sourced partial it carried before that host was ruled forbidden.

The yearly price. U04b_price_yearly=4.08 is the EUR effective-monthly rate of the one-year plan (49 EUR/year) on airvpn.org/buy/, flat on renewal like every AirVPN term.

The wordmark. AirVPN serves its wordmark only as PNG (/static/img/logo/web_header.png, logo_horiz.png) and has no press or brand page, so logos/airvpn.svg is left absent per AUDITOR.md §1 rather than tracing a raster.

On the record as a whole.

AirVPN is a sole proprietorship ("AirVPN di Paolo Brini") registered in Perugia, Italy, and explicitly refuses service to residents of Italy (stated on every page footer and in the Terms of Service §1) — the practical effect is that its own home jurisdiction cannot compel it to log its own resident customers, though this is not evidence of a broader logging-mandate exemption.

AirVPN prices only in EUR (airvpn.org/buy/): 7.00 EUR/month, 49 EUR/year (4.08 EUR/month), flat on renewal. U04_price_monthly (8.11) is 7.00 EUR/month and U04b_price_yearly (56.74) is the 49 EUR/year total, both converted to USD at 1.158 EUR/USD — the rate Mullvad publishes on its own pricing page for the same date, where 5 EUR is shown as 5.79 USD — hence confidence C and a second source for the rate. Multi-year plans drop as low as 2.75 EUR/month.

the rest of what is open — 117 more words

A notable practice data point: public US federal court transcripts in United States v. Klyushin (D. Mass., docket 61629108, documents #183 and #217, found via CourtListener/RECAP) show a law-enforcement pen register was placed directly at the hosting company (DediPath), not at AirVPN, to monitor an AirVPN server's IP from Jan–Feb 2020; AirVPN's own staff, replying on their forum, confirmed the company had no knowledge of or involvement in the tap and that the device had to be installed outside AirVPN's own systems.

This is recorded in P12_case_history as a court_order/nothing_produced event, sourced to AirVPN's own forum confirmation (not to the PACER PDFs themselves, which returned 403 to automated fetches and were read only via a secondary summary).

RetentionDoes a record exist that links traffic to a person, and who checked?13 fields read · 9 not applicable · 34.9 points of pressure×0.651

Composed rather than added: a prior of 0.55 on the none branch, moved by what the paper says (0.0) and by what the practice shows (0.3875), at credence 0.3875 from the audit and 0.35 from how the provider engaged, against a severity of 0.03 for what is actually retained.

Retention linkable to a person as declaredmaterialC01_linkable_retention

none_linkable

Bairvpn.org26 Aug 2026

Report a problem with C01_linkable_retention

Persistent device identifier the provider holdsC12_device_identifier

none

Bplay.google.com26 Aug 2026

Report a problem with C12_device_identifier

At least one independent auditmaterialV01_audit_exists

no

Cbleepingcomputer.com26 Aug 2026

Report a problem with V01_audit_exists

Computed

×0.368 of a clean record completeness 82%

Where the drop comes from: Retention. It is the channel this record's risk is concentrated in — on its own it takes a clean record to ×0.651, and its bar above is filled to that.

Exposure is recorded as medium and the integrity status as clean.

Against the rest of the register, this record sits furthest above on Integrity — ×1.000 where the register averages ×0.658 — and furthest below on Silence, ×0.760 against ×0.927.

Published score

Every row above is one field of the published record, and every one of them can be challenged: every row carries Report, or raise something about the record as a whole. A correction with a source behind it is made the same day, and if it moves the score it moves the rank.

Specification

Carried, never scored

Countries with an exit

What changed

If this one is not right

Compared with

AirVPN

Proton VPN

Mullvad VPN

IVPN

Where the security score comes from