OysterVPN is a new service that just broke onto the scene in 2023, which makes it a relative baby in the VPN industry. That newness is too readily apparent, however, which brings down the overall experience. Offering minimal reasons to choose it over premium competitors like Editors’ Choice winners NordVPN and Proton VPN, along with a lack of audits or speedy servers to choose from, OysterVPN has some growing to do before it produces pearls.How Much Does OysterVPN Cost?OysterVPN starts at $5.99 per month, which is well under the $10.29 average among the VPNs we’ve tested in 2024.
(Credit: OysterVPN/PCMag)
The company offers an annual plan that brings the pricing to $39.99 per year or $3.34 monthly.
Lastly, the company offers a lifetime membership for $59.99, just $20 more than its annual subscription. We often recommend that you try a service by signing up for a one-month subscription before taking the full plunge, and the same advice remains true for OysterVPN in its current state.
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That said, the company offers a 30-day money-back guarantee in case you’re unhappy with the service after using it.
How a VPN Works
You can pay for the service with any major credit card or PayPal. However, there are no options to pay with cryptocurrency, Alipay, or any of the other anonymous payment methods we would like to see, which aim to protect both your device and financial privacy at once.Mullvad VPN notably offers €5 per month pricing ($5.36 as of this writing), which makes it one of the best cheap VPNs we’ve tested.What Do You Get for Your Money With OysterVPN?OysterVPN limits your usage to five devices simultaneously, which is bang-on average for the industry. We generally prefer to recommend VPNs that offer the option to increase that device count for an increased cost or, better yet, offer an unlimited number of devices per account. OysterVPN doesn’t have options for either of these. When it comes to unlimited plans, services like IPVanish leave your plan unrestricted, but the company will still monitor your plan if it notices any significant increases in your account’s usage patterns. (Note: IPVanish is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com’s parent company. For more, see the ethics policy in our Editorial Mission Statement.)Along with IPVanish, Ghostery Midnight, Surfshark, and Avira Phantom VPN put no limits on simultaneous connections.What VPN Protocols Does OysterVPN Offer?OysterVPN offers a wide variety of connection protocols, but this isn’t always a good thing. In OysterVPN’s Windows client, we found the option to connect to IKEv2/IPSec, L2TP/IPSec, PPTP, and OpenVPN. Several of those options (including L2TP and PPTP) have long been cracked and are not considered secure tunnels over which to send traffic that you want to be protected from prying eyes.
(Credit: OysterVPN/PCMag)
At the bottom of the window we found a message reading “WireGuard: Coming Soon,” which isn’t what we want to see. Preferred by many major providers both for its speed and security, not offering WireGuard in the middle of 2024 is a major misstep for any VPN that wants to stay competitive in this market.OysterVPN Servers and Server LocationsAnother clear sign that OysterVPN is still in the early stages of getting its network capacity ramped up is the significant lack of server locations and servers to choose from. OysterVPN offers just 18 locations, with roughly 40 servers to choose from down to the city level. This is quite low compared with some other VPNs we’ve tested around this price, including Mullvad VPN, which operates over 800 servers across more than 70 cities in 41 countries.Your Privacy With OysterVPNOysterVPN is located in Ireland and owned by Oyster Digital Solutions Ltd. It’s a new provider that launched its VPN services in early 2023. Ireland is ideal because it is outside the 14 Eyes spying collective and has no mandatory domestic data retention laws. OysterVPN provides several resources regarding its logging policy and promises to keep only the minimal information required from its users to sustain operations.
What Is Two-Factor Authentication?
A ding here, however, is the lack of a third-party audit for OysterVPN for its no-logs policy, which is a must-have for any VPN that wants to operate at high levels. Audits and reports are not a guarantee of quality and are admittedly imperfect tools, but undertaking them in a meaningful way is still valuable.Hands On With OysterVPN for WindowsYou can configure many different devices to use OysterVPN’s services. The company offers native apps for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, ChromeOS, Linux, macOS, and routers. It also offers browser plug-ins for Firefox, Chrome, and Edge.Installing the OysterVPN application was not as quick and easy on our Intel NUC 13 Extreme Kit (‘Raptor Canyon’) test PC running the latest version of Windows 10 as we’ve come to expect. In fact, it was downright difficult. While the Oyster VPN iOS, Android, and macOS apps all installed without issue, we were unable to get OysterVPN past Windows Defender. The app was flagged as carrying a trojan. We contacted the company about this and were told, “It’s due to the security certificate. The app is currently not signed with our certificate, and we’re in the process of obtaining it. It will be added soon so that Windows doesn’t flag the app.” This is the first, and hopefully only, time a security product has been released to the general public without the necessary security certificates attached. This is a massive oversight on the part of OysterVPN, which claims, “We are pretty much done from our side and waiting verification for the certificate.”
(Credit: OysterVPN/PCMag)
The app’s interface is quite minimal, nearly to the point of being frustrating. While we appreciate clean, simple interfaces, there is so little information on display that it simply either says “connected” or “disconnected.”These days, many VPN Windows clients offer a plethora of helpful information while you’re connected to their services. These can include anything from how much bandwidth you’ve used on your plan to how many devices are currently connected across your account, or at the least, a map pin that shows where your server is routing your traffic through.OysterVPN includes none of these metrics, instead opting for a window that just tells you whether or not the VPN is enabled, and that’s it. The Settings and configuration options are equally slim, offering the choice to change your protocol, commit to a DNS leak test, or choose how the Kill Switch and ad-blocking features behave.We found the ad-blocking option, based on a DNS filter, to be hit or miss. While it would sometimes clear all ads from a page, other times streaming services like Twitch, YouTube, and Hulu all still displayed ad content without any filtration from OysterVPN’s servers.OysterVPN on Other PlatformsWe tested the OysterVPN apps for Android, ChromeOS, iOS, and macOS. On iOS, the app is quite well-designed, snappy, and informative.
(Credit: OysterVPN/PCMag)
We especially like how the app handles switching the menu. Just a portion of the main window is minimized, and you can scroll the left-hand side for your preferred settings. Overall, the app offers the same experience as you’ll find on a desktop but also has some handy tools we haven’t seen on many other mobile VPN apps. These include a DNS leak test, a WebRTC test, an IP address checker, and even a random password generator. Not necessary features, but nice to have nonetheless.Can You Watch Netflix With OysterVPN?Many streaming video services block VPNs because you can use them to spoof your location and access content licensed for specific regions. Netflix is the example that comes most readily to mind. Another is BBC’s free streaming app, iPlayer, which is only available to UK citizens. But if you hop onto a VPN server in London, you may appear to be a local.
During testing, we could access the entire Netflix library in an Open format when connected to all five OysterVPN servers we tried, including Canada, Japan, the UK, the US, and Australia. You can learn more about how we qualify the Open format in how to unblock Netflix with a VPN, and you can see the results of our testing in the chart above.Speed and PerformanceA VPN service usually reduces download and upload speeds and increases latency. To compare the impact of each VPN on web browsing, we take a series of speed measurements using Ookla’s Speedtest tool with and without the VPN running from a box located in New York City, connecting to the closest server offered, and then find a percent change between the two. (Note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com’s parent company. For more, see the ethics policy in our Editorial Mission Statement.)OysterVPN performed quite poorly in these tests. Results show that OysterVPN decreased download speed test scores by 67.7% and decreased upload speed test scores by 72.31%. Combined with its latency increases of 450%, it reliably scored third-from-last in every test we ran compared with 30 other VPNs in the space.Notably, this was all while connected to the closest server we could find in New York City. Though we don’t record them officially, these speeds got significantly worse, near the point of unusability, while we were connected to more distant servers in Canada and the UK. Any distant hops on OysterVPN’s network threaten to cripple your network bandwidth, so be wary.You can see the full results in the table below:
Because your experience with a VPN will differ dramatically depending on when, where, and how you use it, we strongly advise against using speed as a deciding factor when making a purchase. Instead, we suggest focusing on features, cost, and the privacy protections a VPN provides.Verdict: OysterVPN Needs More Time to GrowThe VPN industry is a highly competitive, cutthroat market filled with premium competitors like ProtonVPN and NordVPN that make it difficult to break in for smaller providers. That is apparent across OysterVPN, from its limited feature set to its wanting privacy policy, lack of WireGuard protocol, and no verified security certificate on Windows PCs. Add to that a massive reduction in connection speeds while connected to a New York City server while testing from a New York City-based box, and it’s clear that OysterVPN still has a ways to go before it can command the same presence in VPNs as its closest competition.
Cons
Outdated security certificate on Windows
Significant speed reductions in testing
No third-party audit
No support for WireGuard protocol
Few payment options
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The Bottom Line
While sleek on the surface, OysterVPN still needs several features, servers, and performance upgrades before it can take on well-established competitors.
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