Why did the devs remove the ability to choose a specific country on free with the latest update?
Hi! We made some changes on the Free plan to improve connection speed:
- We’ve added new free servers in Romania and Poland (on top of the US, Netherlands and Japan).
- Now, you are auto-connected to the fastest server available by default (which is preferred by 99% of users).
- Load balancing formula has been improved.
The default connection will give you the best experience available. You can, however, choose to change to another randomly allocated server.
If you want to access country-specific content, we recommend checking out our paid plans, where you can choose between 70+ countries: Pricing | Proton VPN. Our free VPN has no ads, no logs, and is as secure & private as our paid plans. It’s made possible thanks to the support from our paid users, NOT your data. With that in mind, certain features are necessarily available only on our paid plans.
The devs did what they were asked to do. Many people will be fine with the fastest server for quick connect. The ones needing specific countries have more specific use cases in mind than security/protection.
If the decision was made to limit those use cases or because they know, people with those use cases are more likely to pay for premium? We won’t know for sure, probably 
If you don’t want them to end up like Skiff and be eaten they need money to pay the bills and keep development going.
Free service comes with compromise everywhere.
Let me get this straight. You are using a free product financed by the paid plans. They need paid users to allow free plans to exist. Moreover the way they work is the only reason why a free VPN can be considered acceptable because all the other free VPNs are literally a data stealer.
It’s obviously a way to make people try the free tier but then migrate to the paid plan. Don’t complain whenever you don’t get anymore a service for free the way you want. Be happy you get that service for free without giving all your data away because your connection is paid by other customers.
EDIT: free became fee by mistake
Simple answer, cough out money if you want that feature.
You get what you don’t pay for?
The free plan is only so you can try the service to make sure it works for you. It is not for you to use every day as a primary VPN. You don’t need to choose a country to see if it works for you.
Yes, the latest update for free users removes country selection as well as server IP selection.
Country selection is important for bypassing streaming blocks such as Netflix, Hulu, etc., but more importantly, everyday use and downloading to disc normally requires the most ‘local’ server you can find.
Previously, free users had a limited selection of server IPs to choose from within a country.
Though somewhat tedious, it was possible to locate the closest (usually, fastest) server by going through the server IPs while checking their locations in a browser.
It was also possible to enter those servers in your profile so you could always access the closest server in one click.
Once this was done, there was no need to upgrade to a paid plan for the majority of free users.
So Proton’s Marketing team had to do something to incentivize free users to move to a paid plan (quite understandable).
Now free users have ‘randomized’ servers, no selections, no server profiles.
I think this will lead to more conversions to a paid plan, but the paid plan may not necessarily be on Proton.
Because they want you to pay
The previously available functionalities like VPN accelerator, LAN connection and Split Tunneling is also removed!
btw, does protonvpn on linux support wireguard? I don’t see that option in settings, but I’m not sure if it’s because of the free (= non paid) version or not
That’s is true they’ve changed recently it is pretty annoying for me too I just wanted to use the Japanese vpn which is hard to find and they had it for free so I didn’t consider for paying them but I think now I should consider of paying for vpn as it is impossible to connect to a japaneses server.
Oh no, god forbid they limit something they give you for free! /s
Oh I feel so bad for you. You should definitely get a refund. /s
Maybe for the same reason I can watch free TV at the TV shop but they ask me to pay to take the TV home with me and watch it at my own leisure. But tomorrow I will go and ask the seller why they are doing this.
If this was some kinda game to force me to pay then I’m gonna pay some other service
I am in the Netherlands, so why would I want to connect to the Netherlands? I want to use the US and I can’t do that anymore. So you saying we now have 5 options instead of 3 is not true. I have NO options. It will only and automatically choose the Netherlands.
I guess I have to get a paid plan, but needless to say that it won’t be ProtonVPN, just to piss them off.
Best $5 a month you’ll ever spend.