"Independent" is the most overused word in VPN reviews — and some of the sites using it are literally owned by VPN companies. Here's a fair, criteria-based grade of who's actually independent. We graded ourselves too.
A reader can't easily tell a real review from a rate card — they look identical. Both have star ratings, "we tested 30 VPNs" language, and a confident #1. The difference is structural and invisible from the page: who owns the site, how it gets paid, and whether it's willing to rank a product that pays it nothing. So we built a scorecard around those questions and applied it evenly — to the big affiliate players, to our closest competitor, and to ourselves.
We grade each site on five yes/no criteria. None of them is about how slick the site looks — they're about incentive structure, which is what survives contact with a sales quarter.
| Site / type | Indep. owner | Discloses affiliate | Ranks non-payers fairly | Open method | Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| vpnMentor / WizCase owned by Kape, a VPN holding co. | No | Partial | No | Partial | F |
| Typical "Top 10 VPN" SEO sites commission-ranked listicles | Varies | Partial | No | No | D– |
| Independent, affiliate-funded reviewers transparent, commission-funded | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | B+ |
| Subscription-funded press e.g. Wirecutter model | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partial | A– |
| VPN Insider (us) independent, commission-firewalled | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | A– |
Grades reflect incentive structure, not content quality on any given day. A conflicted site can still publish accurate facts; the grade measures how much the business model pulls against the reader.
The clearest conflict in the industry isn't subtle. Kape Technologies — which owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost and Private Internet Access — also bought Webselenese, the company behind the review sites vpnMentor and WizCase, in 2021 for roughly US$149 million.1 That means a VPN holding company owns "independent" sites that review VPNs, including its own. After the acquisition, those sites' rankings favored Kape-owned brands. No methodology disclosure can fix that incentive; the reviewer and the reviewed are the same balance sheet. This is the single most important thing to know about VPN reviews, and it's why we devote a whole page to who owns what.
Most of the better sites are genuinely independent of VPN ownership and openly disclose that they earn affiliate commissions. The strongest of them publish a written methodology, and some even rank a no-commission provider like Mullvad near the top despite earning nothing from it — a good-faith setup we grade accordingly. The structural caveat we'd flag fairly applies across the board: headline "top picks" still tend to link out through affiliate URLs, and the highest-paying brands have a way of surfacing near the top. Transparent disclosure reduces the conflict; it doesn't erase the gravitational pull of which links pay. "No pay-to-play" is a claim worth respecting and worth verifying — the difference between disclosing commissions and ranking independently of them is the whole game.
It would be dishonest to grade everyone else and exempt ourselves, so: VPN Insider is affiliate-funded too. We earn a commission if you subscribe through some of our links. The difference we've built the whole site around is a commission firewall — payout data is kept structurally separate from scoring, our rankings are driven by real-user sentiment we can't monetize, and the VPN we rank #1, Mullvad, pays us exactly nothing. We give ourselves an A–, not an A, for the same reason we cap every affiliate-funded site: as long as any link earns a commission, the only honest claim is "walled off," not "immune." We'd rather show you the wall than pretend there's no money.
Find the highest-rated VPN that pays no commissions (Mullvad is the usual litmus). If a site ranks it at or near the top, the site can probably afford to be honest. If that VPN is missing or buried under brands with big payouts, you're reading a rate card with a star rating on it.
You don't need our scorecard — you can run the test on any review site you land on. Check three things: Who owns it? (search the site name plus "owned by" — if a VPN company appears, stop.) How does it get paid? (look for an affiliate disclosure; no disclosure is itself a red flag.) And where's Mullvad? (the no-commission control case). Those three questions will tell you more than any "we tested 47 VPNs" headline.
VPNInsider.org · Industry Analysis · updated monthly · June 2026.