That shiny '100% free VPN' button isn't a bargain. Someone is still getting paid just not by you, and not for your benefit.
Most people grab a VPN so they can keep bingeing from other postal codes (57 % of mobile users, per the numbers), dodge identity theft (about half), or keep their personal stuff off the café Wi-Fi router (33 %).
The app store teases you with a no-price tag, then hands you a 500 MB daily ration and three random servers that may or may not load a 1080p trailer. Meanwhile the privacy policy buried three menus deep—quietly confesses it logs every domain you touch.
Free tiers have to monetize somehow. Common tricks: sell browsing profiles to ad brokers, inject extra banners into pages, or throttle speeds until you upgrade. Some are just proxies: your IP changes, but the traffic isn’t fully tunneled, so the ISP can still read the headers. You wanted encryption; you got a glorified incognito window.
The app store makes it easy to grab a free VPN and move on. But a VPN sits between you and everything you do online—your banking, your searches, your location. That's a lot of trust to hand to a company whose business model you've never actually looked at. Before you install anything, spend two minutes reading how the provider makes money. If the answer isn't clear, that's your answer.
Source: Security | Bitdefender