EDIT: We have a new update regarding this here: https://reddit.com/r/Windscribe/comments/14bg6ew/we_decided_you_can_keep_the_free_lifetime/
Some of you may have noticed a notification and/or email sent to you letting you know that your upgraded Free plan will be deprecated and your monthly VPN bandwidth will go down to 10GB per month. Some of you may have already been downgraded to the 10GB plan. In this post we’d like to answer a few questions and clarify some concerns that people had regarding this change.
First off, who will be affected by these changes?
The changes we’re making right now will be affecting anyone on an upgraded Free plan with 20GB or more monthly bandwidth. There are a couple of exceptions to this but let’s explain some basics first.
All Windscribe accounts have 2 different types of bandwidth allotted to them. The first is the actual Base plan you are on, so 2GB per month, 10GB per month, 50GB per month, etc, and the second is what we call Bonus bandwidth. Bonus bandwidth is what you get when you refer people to our service (you get +1GB for every person referred), it’s what you get when you buy a Custom plan (each location on a custom plan is an additional 10GB to your account as long as you have the custom plan), and it covers some other situations like Mine-for-Upgrades bonuses.
The total monthly bandwidth you have on your account is the sum of your base plan and any bonus bandwidth. Here are a couple of examples:
- You are on the 10GB Free plan and purchase a custom plan with 3 locations which gives a bonus of 30GB while you have the custom plan. Total bandwidth = 40GB.
- You have the 15GB Free plan and referred 10 people to get 10GB of Bonus bandwidth. Total bandwidth = 25GB
Once again, these changes will only affect any base plan that is 20GB or more. The 15GB Tweet-4-Data plan and any Bonus Bandwidth you may have are unaffected.
Here are some examples before and after the changes:
|BEFORE|AFTER|
|—|—|—|—|—|
|You have a 50GB base plan with an extra 10GB from referrals for a total of 60GB.|The 50GB plan downgrades to 10GB and you keep the bonus 10GB referral bandwidth for a total of 20GB.|
|You have a 30GB base plan and added an extra 50GB through the discontinued Mine-for-Upgrades program for a total of 80GB.|The 30GB plan goes down to 10GB, bonus stays for a new total of 60GB.|
|You are on the 15GB Tweet-4-Data plan and bought a Custom plan with 3 locations for a total of 45GB|No changes to the base plan, the bonus stays as long you have the custom plan, so total remains 45GB.|
|You are on the 50GB Free plan with no Bonus bandwidth.|The 50GB plan gets deprecated and you will now have the 10GB Free plan.|
|You claimed the Tweet-4Data 15GB plan and then also claimed a 50GB upgrade. The 50GB supersedes the 15GB plan to give you a total 50GB.|The 50GB plan gets deprecated and you will be reverted back to the previous 15GB plan.|
All people who are affected by this will also have received an offer to purchase a yearly Pro plan at a highly discounted price.
Now, why are we doing this?
There are a couple of reasons for this decision. Some of the upgrade codes we released were meant for a specific set of users who are living in countries with severe internet restrictions during a time where access to internet is vital. These were upgrades for people in Russia and Ukraine who were having their internet censored during a war, users in Iran who couldn’t get access to the open internet during long and difficult country-wide protests, Turkish residents who were dealing with internet restrictions after a devastating earthquake, and a few other cohorts.
While the upgrade codes were meant to help people in specific countries, because we don’t track where users are, there was no way to enforce those geographic intentions. And so, hundreds of thousands of people who were completely unaffected by any restrictions were claiming these codes on their accounts because hey, it’s a free upgrade and who’s gonna stop them? The relief codes were also meant to be temporary, to get people through the toughest of restrictions during the most heated times of conflict, which typically results in a drastic increase in internet blocking.
It certainly didn’t help that people spun up bots to create tons of free Windscribe accounts and claim these upgrade codes, only to then sell the upgraded accounts in shady telegram groups where people get scammed (please report any of these resellers if you see them). Thousands of accounts were made by bad actors who abused this solely for their own gain as opposed to leaving it for the people who need it. There’s also no simple way for us to detect which accounts are good and which are bad because of how little we track so pruning the upgrades only from the bad actors isn’t possible.
Along with the temporary relief codes we put out in the last 18 months, well before that we also released some offers to get 50GB or sometimes even 60GB upgrades to your Free plan. It was a no-brainer to grab one of these free upgrades for yourself back in 2016-2019 when other free VPNs would give you 1-10% of the monthly bandwidth we offered with these upgrades. So naturally, many people did.
Which leads us to the second reason for why we’re doing this. We’ve always tried to be transparent with our userbase and the reality is, in order to keep hiring more developers, expanding our server infrastructure and improving the service, we have to find ways to reduce our spending. Don’t worry, we’re not on the verge of collapse or anything close to that. We’re still going strong, but our mission is not yet complete. Our goal is to be the biggest ethical privacy company on the market, and we’re trying to do this entirely self-funded - no VC interference for us, thanks. The first few years of Windscribe’s growth were very positive and with a small team and a few million registrations, we were able to afford a lot of benefits for our users, like 50GB Free plan upgrades.
Now, we’ve passed 60 million registered users and have almost 50 employees. The competition in the VPN industry is only growing, while the economy and consumer spending are going down. We need to stay on top of our game. We don’t have a 100 million dollar VC piggy bank to play around with (VC money comes with conditions that can be antithetical to our morals). Supporting hundreds of thousands of users on these upgraded free plans isn’t free for us as we pay for servers and bandwidth, nor is it giving us any returns. Our metrics show that very few people on the upgraded free plans actually upgrade to any paid plans. From a business perspective, supporting these upgraded free plans long term with no returns is not economically feasible which is why we made the decision to deprecate those plans and revert the people who had them back to the standard 10GB (or 15GB) Free plan.
“Weren’t these supposed to be lifetime upgrades?”
You may have seen some old comments made by us or recall some websites advertising these upgrade codes as “Lifetime upgrades”. This is true, we did in fact say that these were lifetime upgrades. These comments were also made 7 years ago when we didn’t know how things would pan out down the line. Back then, we made the assumption that we’d be able to support these upgrades forever without any downsides as our trajectories were all very positive. We certainly didn’t foresee a global pandemic, wars and an economy heading straight for the dumpster. And our costs didn’t go up in a linear fashion either, we didn’t simply get more servers over time, we’ve had an enormous amount of work done on our infrastructure to make it faster, more secure, more flexible, more reliable and more resilient. That isn’t done with a few lines of code written over a weekend - it has taken years of development while we also still expand our network. Now that we’re here, today, with all this knowledge, we have to reconsider some of the choices we made back then.
At the end of the day, these were free offers that we gave away and people got to use them for 5-6 years for a total cost to the user of zero dollars and zero cents. These upgrades were never sold, there is no legal purchase agreement that we’re breaking, and as per our Terms of Service, “Windscribe does not guarantee as to the continuous availability of the service or of any specific feature(s) of the service…Windscribe may impose usage or service limits, suspend service, or block certain kinds of usage at our sole discretion.”
“Are users on Lifetime Pro plans affected?”
No, the Lifetime Pro plan is an actual paid plan. If you have it, it will remain unchanged on your account. You were advertised a service you would get access to for as long as the company exists if you paid the price on the site. We’re still around so if you paid that price, you will still have the service.
“Will there be other relief codes in the future?”
Yes, we are still going to help people in places where severe internet restrictions pop up by offering them some relief codes for extra bandwidth. These codes will activate a temporary upgrade on the account and after some time, the plan will automatically downgrade back to the original 10 or 15GB plan.
We know this change isn’t going to make people happy, no one likes having things taken away from them, but at the end of the day we are a business and we sometimes have to make some tough business decisions. We hope this post has answered any questions and cleared up any confusion there may have been about the situation. If you still have any questions or concerns, feel free to post them in this thread so we can continue the discussion.