[chmod775]

Mullvad uses the superior way of not having a real account at all - you just get a number you can "deposit" money into.

It's the only way they can reliably prevent abuse like a thousand people using one number - because this way you can just track the number of open connections per account number.

This is superior to tracking IP-addresses to detect fraud for obvious privacy reasons. I do a similar thing for a service I run.

Out of curiosity, how do you even manage to use more than five devices for private use at once? Even just owning that many is unlikely.

[ss3000]

As much as I appreciate Mullvad's stance around privacy, I don't actually use a VPN for privacy (I use Tor for that), but mostly for bypassing geo-restrictions on my entertainment devices for games and streaming services and whatnot.

For that use case, I can't justify paying double/triple the price as other providers that offer 2/3x the devices for the same price. The provider I use now, Surfshark, offers unlimited devices for about 1/3 of the price, and also recently started offering WireGuard, it would be financially irresponsible for me to choose Mullvad which would effectively 10x what I'm paying right now for the same number of devices.

FWIW I understand that their account number mechanism is superior from a privacy perspective, and that there's no way to support unlimited devices while combating fraud using that mechanism. It's just not the right set of tradeoffs for my use case.

[bzbarsky]

It's easy enough to get to 5 devices, for a family. Especially given the current remote work/schooling situation. Figure 1 laptop or tablet per person (adults and kids) and 1 phone per adult. If you have two kids, that's 6 devices right there. And that's assuming none of the kids are old enough to have phones, none of the adults have separate work/personal laptops, no separate work phones for the adults, etc.

[jsjohnst]

> Out of curiosity, how do you even manage to use more than five devices for private use at once? Even just owning that many is unlikely.

I’m not GP and I certainly don’t take GP’s stance about limiting to 5 devices (I think it makes sense), but claiming it’s unlikely that someone owns more than five devices is silly, especially if someone has a family. My non-tech sister’s family of four has two phones, three iPads, two laptops, etc. As another example, I literally own over an order of magnitude more devices than just five devices for private use (yes, I’m an outlier).

[chmod775]

> but claiming it’s unlikely that someone owns more than five devices is silly

No I specifically said use, not own. You can own more than 5 devices with your mullvad account number, you just can't be connected on all of them at the same time. Also I wasn't expecting people would share their accounts with their family, which is already questionable.

[jsjohnst]

> Also I wasn't expecting people would share their accounts with their family, which is already questionable.

Do families not already share Netflix, iTunes, Spotify, Amazon Prime, etc etc? I’m not sure why it would be such a leap for them to share a VPN, especially if the reason they are using the VPN at all is simply to get around GeoIP restrictions (which I’m not condoning, but obviously many do it).

[jsjohnst]

> Even just owning that many is unlikely.

> No I specifically said use, not own.

These two verbatim quotes from you seem to be in conflict with each other.

[chmod775]

My question was about using that many devices. And I'll quote myself here fully:

> Out of curiosity, how do you even manage to use more than five devices for private use at once? Even just owning that many is unlikely.

One sentence is a question, the other is a statement which I consider to be true (and explains how I arrived at that question).

Also it was quite clear from my argument that I was talking about people singular, and you responded pretending I was saying that an entire family owning more than 5 devices is unlikely.

I can't imagine why you'd be arguing like this, I just hope it's not on purpose.

[jsjohnst]

> I can't imagine why you'd be arguing like this, I just hope it's not on purpose.

Seriously? OP never said just me and only me uses all five plus devices. I and others gave you multiple examples of how that could be very possible realistically, and then you shift goal posts and say it’s us being argumentative. I’m done, have a good life!