Five days free, no card
Free virtual private network: the small print
The easiest way to understand a free tier is to spend an imaginary Saturday on one.
No card, no account. The key is cut and delivered in Telegram in about a minute.
- 60 sfrom the bot to a working key
- 5devices on one key
- 6locations, two of them in the UK
- 0logs kept
- London9 ms
- Manchester14 ms
- Dublin19 ms
- Amsterdam16 ms
- Madrid34 ms
- New York78 ms
Every location runs VLESS over Reality, which reads as ordinary HTTPS on a filtered network.
- Fits v2rayNG, Hiddify, V2Box, Streisand
- No app of ours to lose
- Five devices on one key
- Five days free, then a flat price per term
- No logs, no account
First, the words
Virtual private network is the long form of VPN, and there is no technical difference between the two. A free virtual private network is a VPN that you do not pay for with money. The phrase comes mostly from people at the start of their search, so this page skips the theory and describes what using one is actually like.
A Saturday on a typical free tier
- ✓9 am: email and the news. It works well. Free tiers are built for exactly this.
- ✓11 am: you look for a London server, so that your banking app stays calm. There is none. Free users get Amsterdam or New York.
- ✓2 pm: the football is on. The stream stutters, because free users share the busiest machines.
- ✓6 pm: a notice tells you that most of the month's allowance has gone. It was two gigabytes.
- ✓8 pm: a film is out of the question. The app suggests the annual plan.
- ✓10 pm: you read the privacy policy at last, and find the phrase trusted partners.
None of that is a scandal
A capped free tier from a company you can name is an honest sample. It is simply small, and it is small by design. The trouble starts with services that promise a virtual private network for free and mention no limits at all, because a service with real costs and no price has to be funded from somewhere you cannot see. When you read lists with titles like virtual private network best, or best virtual private network service, remember that they are ranking the paid plans. The free section at the bottom is there to catch the search.
Browser switches and whole device tunnels
Several browsers now advertise a built in VPN. A virtual private network browser of that kind protects the traffic of that browser and nothing else. The mail app, the messenger and the games console next to it are untouched, and some of these switches are plain proxies under a friendlier name. A tunnel set up by a client app covers the whole device. That is what people generally expect when they hear the word, and it is what a Royal Key provides.
Five questions to put to any free service
- ✓Who runs you, and in which country?
- ✓What exactly is the limit: gigabytes, locations, devices, hours?
- ✓What do you record, and for how long?
- ✓How do you make your money?
- ✓Is there a UK server on the free tier? Usually there is not.
Testing a full service for nothing
Five free days, no card
Try the key in your own lock first
Open the Telegram bot and get your personal VLESS key in about 30 seconds.
- Your key arrives in Telegram within a minute
- No card, no email address, no ID checks
- Fits a client you may already have
- Covers five devices
Nothing is charged, and no plaque renews by itself.
The ledger
We keep no ledger of you, only of the key
Royal Key holds three things: a Telegram chat, the key sent to it and the date that key expires. No account sits behind them, so there is nothing for a log to attach to, and we never ask for a name, an email address or a phone number. It is a modest claim, and we prefer it to pretending that no jurisdiction could ever reach us.
- No account, email address or phone number
- No record of the sites you visit
- No connection times or IP addresses kept
- No card details: you pay inside Telegram
- No renewal and no charge you did not choose
At the counter
Asked at the counter
Is a virtual private network the same thing as a VPN?
Yes. One is the abbreviation of the other.
Are free ones safe?
Capped tiers from known companies are. Be wary of unlimited offers from publishers you cannot trace.
Why do free tiers have no UK server?
British hosting costs more, so it is kept for paying customers.
Does the Royal Key trial have a data cap?
No. Five days is the only limit.
Do I need to install your software?
There is none. The key goes into a free open source client.
What happens after the trial?
The key stops. If you do nothing, nothing else happens.
Question not on the list?
The bot that cuts keys also answers questions. The setup section names the client to install.