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In my very broad experience in heavily testing more than 20 VPNs (and living in highly censored country where they do block VPNs like in China), there are only 10% who does go beyond standard solutions. This would be Astrill and 12VPN. The rest is piece of crap not worth being paid even $12 per year.
Haha I paid US$11.88 per year for purevpn and I will not recommend it myself based on the experiences over the past two weeks. Anyway the real tests will be next week to see if it can bypass China GFW or not.
My requirements are a bit low as mainly for browsing or 480p/720p/1080p streaming.
Let's see the experiences of those who paid US$9.6 per year or US$19.2 for two years Surfshark. I think at least Surfshark should be better than purevpn.
I do not think Astril/12VPN are that attractive to me though as my main use case is going into China and only need to bypass China GFW for less than 10days every year.
My use cases are probably less common here since I have zero interests in Netflix or Amazon Prime Video or Hulu or things like that.
1) dedicated going into China VPN like SpeedIn or Transocks or SpeedCN, etc. Unfortunately no better solution than these dedicated solutions which you can throw privacy and security out of the window, with probably FlyVPN as an exception.
2) free Windscribe is already good for my Singapore public wifi uses cases. Paid purevpn works even better
3) occasionally I want to try BBC iPlayer and purevpn is good enough.
4) Still I like to try out alternative protocols like SS/V2Ray/Wireguard/Trojan next year, probably on VPS (eg, Aliyun to go into China and Google/etc to bypass GFW), nothing mission critical, just want to play with Linux based stuff.