Surfshark is the cheapest VPN on the market. I’ve used it for over a year and I’ve had lots of different experiences.
Reputability
The service seems decently reputable. Cure53 did their code review and their business is based in BVL. There don’t fall under 5, 9 or 14 Eyes jurisdiction. I also don’t know of any cases where people received angry legal mail from copyright agencies or trolls after using Surfshark. The VPN seems to be doing its job.
The Awful Client
These days I use the OpenVPN client instead of the one provider by Surfshark. Theirs is truly awful.
Connection Type Changes
It likes to change the connection type on its own, even If you set it manually. It will still randomly change it to whatever it likes.
Unwanted Antivirus
There is an antivirus running in their program, even If you didn’t order or enable it. It will still spit logs every minute of the day. You can’t turn it off. This funky piece of bloatware you didn’t ask for will stay with you for the remainder of your subscription.
Killswitch Not Working
The killswitch doesn’t work properly. It only works when you’re already connected. If you’re connecting, it will not block internet traffic. This function likes to act funny and is to be in no way relied upon.
There is a chance the app will just randomly log you out, voiding your killswitch.
If you’re torrenting, do set the network interface to the one VPN made. If you’re using qBitTorrent, it’s in the advanced settings. If you don’t, this could cause a major disaster.
The Connection Drops
The VPN usually works fine. Rarely do I experience connection drops, unless I try to torrent files with full speed of my internet (80 Mbps).
The servers can drop the connections even a dozen times per hour when doing both torrenting and browsing the web. If you are not doing both, it happens rarely.
The connection just starts timing out. It will come back eventually, but it’s annoying that it happens.
Speed
The speeds are quite good, but the latency seems to be rather erratic. I tried playing games with it and it did work fine most of the time, but not all the time.
Pricing Tactics
Their service is cheap at 2 euros a month, but you need to pre-pay for 2 whole years.
Renewals are on by default and there is no button to turn them off. You need to contact support to have them turn it off. It’s a very irritating process.
The initial price may be just around 2 euros, but the renewals cost double that amount. If you don’t turn recurring payments off, your debit card will be charged for the next period. Make sure to request it cancelled from the support.
Upsell
They will try to upsell their unnecessary services to you every chance they get. It’s a common sense you don’t get your anti-virus where you get your VPN. They offer a whole array of extra services. It’s a huge red flag to me that a VPN provider is also giving access to their own search or an Anti-virus. You should never combine these things in one product.
Blacklists
The amount of countries Surfshark offers is large, but the amount of IPs is pretty small. That means every single one will be blacklisted somewhere. You will frequently encounter captchas when using Google. Microsoft will outright not even allow you to access any of their service. Smaller websites built on Cloudflare may have issues feeding you content from their CDN.
I didn’t encounter too many problems with blacklists, but it’s worth to mention they exist.
Verdict
For occasional torrenting, it’s a viable option. The connections like to drop, but it’s tolerable at this price point. Their automatic renewals did annoy me, but the service seems to be somewhat reputable. I will keep using it until my subscription expires, but I’m not planning on extending it. I’ll most likely migrate to Mullvad or IVPN.
If you can’t afford anything else, here is a coupon code I found: HONESTGUIDE