VPN providers are using Prime Day to push multi-year subscriptions at steep introductory discounts, with the fine print doing the real work.
Five major VPN services are running promotions through June 26. Surfshark One leads on raw price at $2.79 a month for a two-year plan, with unlimited simultaneous device connections — a genuine differentiator in a category that typically caps you at 10. NordVPN Complete comes in at $4.49 a month for 27 months, bundling a password manager, ad blocker, dark web monitor, and 1 TB of encrypted cloud storage, though renewal jumps to $219.48 a year. ProtonVPN's Plus plan matches ExpressVPN's promotional price at $2.99 a month, with a renewal rate locked at $83.88 annually — a notably transparent offer for a service that leans heavily on its Swiss privacy credentials and open-source audits. Norton trails the field at 54% off and $4.17 a month, but counters with the only 60-day money-back window on the list.
Renewal pricing is where most of these deals quietly fall apart — but not uniformly. ExpressVPN Advanced is the partial exception: its promotional price of $83.72 for two years (down from $475.72) comes with a locked renewal rate of $119.95 every two years, which is a genuine hedge against sticker shock at renewal. The catch is that ExpressVPN's deal drops the standard 30-day money-back guarantee entirely, so there's no easy exit if the service disappoints. That trade-off — price certainty in exchange for refund protection — is worth weighing against ProtonVPN, which keeps the 30-day guarantee and still locks in a favorable renewal rate.
The broader pattern here is familiar: VPN companies treat Amazon's shopping event as a customer acquisition window, front-loading value on year one to secure multi-year commitments. Whether the product is worth the locked-in rate after the honeymoon period is a separate question the discounts are designed to make you not ask.