Not recommended

ClearVPN

Commercial VPNCyprusRank 17 of 68

Paying monthly

$9.99 per month

Paying yearly

$44.99 billed once a year

Coverage

54 countries with an exit

Free tier

No paid trial only

12 out of 100

Security

71 out of 100

Usability

Visit site

Service class

Commercial VPN — security leads

Security score

12 of 100 · Not recommended

Usability score

71 of 100 · state known · 83% established · 82.4% of the weight read

Legal entity

MacPaw Way Ltd.

Jurisdiction

Cyprus

Ultimate owner

Oleksandr Kosovan (MacPaw founder and CEO)

Exposure

Medium · dominant channel: retention

Retention

Session metadata

Latest audit

unknown · unknown · unknown · unknown

Countries with exits

Protocols

IKEv2 OpenVPN WireGuard An obfuscated protocol A vendor protocol with no published source

Works under active censorship

unknown

Weakest protocol still offered

A vendor protocol with no published source

Own DNS inside the tunnel

unknown

Platforms

Windows macOS iOS Android Android TV Apple TV Routers Browser extension

Simultaneous devices

Kill switch

On every platform

Split tunnelling

unknown

Signing up

An email address only

Free tier

A trial only

P2P allowed

Allowed on some servers

Major streaming services reachable

Reachable

Price, monthly

$9.99 per month

Price, yearly

$44.99 a year at renewal, billed once

Offered countries that sit under a logging mandateC09_mandate_countries

United Arab Emirates India Turkey

Country of the ultimate beneficial ownerM11_owner_jurisdiction

Owner group cluster keyM15_owner_group

independent

Date the current owner took controlM16_control_since

2020-11

Role of this brand inside the groupM17_brand_role

principal

Infrastructure shared with cluster siblingsM18_shared_infrastructure

separate

Total published auditsV10_audit_count

unknown

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

32 34 left unknown, 1 not applicable

Completeness

51% the share the model could weigh

Citations

53 across 20 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 · 53 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.

Independent audit. No first-party page — the dedicated "Is ClearVPN safe?" support article, the security section of macpaw.com, or the blog's own sitemap — names an auditor, a report, or a pentest of ClearVPN. Third-party review sites agree none exists. The whole V block stands unknown rather than no, because no document states an audit was refused or never attempted.

Behaviour under a real demand. No transparency report, warrant canary, or case history could be found for ClearVPN specifically, so P05-P09, P11 and P12 stand unknown. The court-order support article states a no-logs policy would leave nothing to hand over, but that is a claim about capability, not a dated event of a demand actually met with nothing.

the rest of what is open — 126 more words

Two of the provider's own pages disagree on the protocol list. A 2023-dated support article names only IKEv2 and OpenVPN; the current App Store and Google Play listings add WireGuard and, on Android, Hysteria2. The record takes the union of all three first-party sources rather than picking one, since neither page is stated to supersede the other.

DNS handling, RAM-only infrastructure and split tunneling are not addressed in the privacy policy, the support library, or either store listing, and stand unknown rather than assumed absent. The same is true of dedicated-IP options and of any measured proof that the service actually works against an active censorship block, so C06, C02, U09 and U06 all leave the usability and hygiene denominators rather than scoring against the provider.

On the record as a whole.

Pricing (order.clearvpn.com/pricing, fetched via browser, JS-rendered): 1 Month $9.99/mo; 1 Year $44.99 billed every year after a 3-day free trial ($3.75/mo equivalent) — this is stated as the ongoing renewal price, not a struck-through intro rate. The 3-day trial is not a standing free tier. ClearVPN also runs a Ukraine-specific free-access programme (Diia partnership) that is a regional promotion, not the general product's free tier.

The live server-status page (clearvpn.com/servers/) lists one row as 'Canada / Bangkok', which is internally inconsistent (Bangkok is in Thailand); it was read as Canada per the country column and not used to add Thailand to the list. A 2025 support article separately states ClearVPN's India location is virtual, physically hosted in Singapore; the live status page does not mark any location as virtual, so India is counted as a physical listing per that page pending reconciliation.

RetentionDoes a record exist that links traffic to a person, and who checked?13 fields read · 11 left unknown · 55.0 points of pressure×0.450

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 (0.0), at credence 0.0 from the audit and 0.2975 from how the provider engaged, against a severity of 0.45 for what is actually retained.

Retention linkable to a person as declaredmaterialC01_linkable_retention

session_metadata

Bclearvpn.com13 Sep 2026

Report a problem with C01_linkable_retention

Persistent device identifier the provider holdsC12_device_identifier

app_scoped_id

Bclearvpn.com13 Sep 2026

Report a problem with C12_device_identifier

At least one independent auditmaterialV01_audit_exists

unknown

nothing published · recorded as asserted

Report a problem with V01_audit_exists

How the report is publishedV02_report_publication

Computed

×0.119 of a clean record completeness 51%

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 ×0.450, 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 Ignorance, ×0.559 against ×0.662.

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

If this one is not right

ClearVPN

Proton VPN

Mullvad VPN

IVPN

Where the security score comes from