TLDR - What is the purpose of the five device limit?
This isn’t a complaint. I’m just curious/trying to understand the purpose of the five device limit.
I TOTALLY understand having a limit on the number of devices that are actively connected to VPN at the same time on a single account. What I don’t understand is putting a limit on the number of devices that have the app installed and signed in to my account.
Why does it matter if someone wants to install the app and sign in to their account on multiple (more than five) devices if they never have more than two of those devices actively connected at the same time?
I’ve looked at different posts here and elsewhere about the device limit, but none I saw gave any explanation or reasoning behind the limit. I’ve never used any other VPN that had a limit on the number of devices that just had the app installed, even if none of them were actively connected.
Because of Mullvad’s policy to not log user activity, they do not have a count of how many connections from your account are active. That would require logging user activity.
What they do is store up to 5 keys (Wireguard credentials) for your account. 1 key = 1 connection. You can always deregister/reregister a device.
You might be able to share the same key between devices if you manually set it up, but then only one of the devices sharing the key can connect at a time.
Just put it on a home router. Maybe. Even if 50 devices connected to the router … still only 1 device .
Fyi.
Edit: Maybe. is a question to the OP.
Cause you definitely can and should you a vpn this way . Much nicer then using a individual client or several.
Why was this downvoted? This is a good info.
This should never be downvoted and hidden
To go alongside u/karinto, Mullvad is also a business. They have a product to sell. Giving unlimited installers/keys/whatever would mean that users could create and share unlimited numbers of keys with friends or family, choosing the company untold amounts of money. Creating an artificial limit of 5 devices allows the average user to have more than enough room for future growth in device count, while more advanced users like you and me will setup our home router as one device so that all devices behind it can access the tunnel without using up additional keys.
You can bypass the limit by downloading an ovpn config file and running it through the open vpn app
I think the 5 device limit is too stringent given how many devices we each have now
Put on router, and send all your traffic through 1 device.
My guess would be that each device connecting with the app gets its own IP address. Each device could be connected to a different server. If they didn’t have the cap they could potentially run out of IP addresses.
If you use Wireguard or OpenVPN on your router instead, there is no limit because all your devices would use the same IP address as every device would be connected to the same server.
I’m not sure if I am right about this or not but to me it is the only thing that makes sense.
Because of Mullvad’s policy to not log user activity, they do not have a count of how many connections from your account are active. That would require logging user activity.
Thank you for this explanation. That makes sense.
And really a vpn service could impose a hard limit on active tcp or udp connects . But that would be a failing model for a vpn service.
I could be playing a game surfing the web listing to crap tunes . And any number of things and they all would be a separate connection to endpoint = vpn service.
How does Proton enable 10?
Sorry to jump this old thread, but why don’t they allow a higher limit for devices and lower limit for concurrent sessions? At least 10 or so devices allowed to be logged in, but only 5 can access at a time or something? People these days have so many devices and setting up a VPN with a hardcoded location on the router is not a solution. I use VPN when I want to and avoid it where it’s not necessary. It’s been about a year and half for me now on mullvad, switching from express. I thought I’d somehow make this 5 device limit work, but I’m basically not using the VPN as much because of it. I really don’t want to juggle between the devices every time I want to use the VPN.
I basically only use two connections max and one connection mostly, but I do need atleast 10 devices to be logged in for things to be smooth. I really don’t want to pay for an additional license for the privilege to login to more devices and still keep using only 2 connections. Whelp, I don’t see them changing their ways just for me or the few other users like me, so switching to Proton after the current term I’m in. I really love mullvad except for this one fault, just that it’s one huge fault in my use case.
I am very dumb for just now realizing why this is a great idea. Here I am constantly deleting all devices because I forgot if Grown Hawk was my computer back home or one I randomly used on an old phone.
Yeah, I know about that and have set that up on my Firewalla Gold. I was just curious what the reasoning is for the limit.
I’ve been trying to set up wireguard with the new update on FreshTomato but it’s not clear on how I should go about it.
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… Or wire guard … they clearly explain how to do this on their website. They do provide a business… and actually most* vpn providers will allow the same level of service. Allowing or offering how to set up the tunnel on a router. …
I don’t think they would run out of private ips. Ie the one you receive on tun0 or wg0 interface .
The # is 16,387,064 local ip per public server they run. … I doubt its a ip related.
16,387,064 is whats available to allocate in 10.0.0.0/24 …
Even big ips use routing like this for traffic that comes to or exits your house.
T-MOBILE uses CGNAT . It just a way of making the pubic ipv4 address’s stretch further .
So I really don’t know why the device limit is set on their service …
Either way they do provide a good service.
why don’t they allow a higher limit for devices and lower limit for concurrent sessions?
That was actually the original question and /u/karinto answered it… to do that, they’d have to log user activity, and the service’s policy (and what we pay for and like) is not to log user activity. It has to be one or the other.