How Much Does CyberGhost Cost?

Because a VPN is largely considered to be an ancillary online service, most people are focused on finding an affordable VPN. While CyberGhost is affordable, it also delivers value through many different features. The VPN provider also has an impressive server fleet, with servers in 125 locations across 100 countries. You can also set up CyberGhost for your router and gaming consoles.

But being affordable and having many features doesn’t necessarily mean CyberGhost is the VPN for you. To help you make a smart decision, we’ve broken down the total cost of CyberGhost and optional add-ons that can provide a more comprehensive online privacy solution. Let’s get into the details.

CyberGhost Subscription Options

On average, VPNs cost around $11.29 a month, so CyberGhost is in the ballpark for a month-to-month plan. But like other providers, if you sign up for a longer length, you’ll pay less. Here’s a summary of CyberGhost’s subscriptions:

Unlike Surfshark that offers multiple subscription tiers, CyberGhost keeps costs simple by only having one pricing tier. The only price difference comes with different levels of commitment: monthly, semi-annually, and biennially (two-year commitments). As you’d expect, the longer you commit the cheaper the average monthly price. The semi-yearly and biennial plans are charged up front, so you have to plunk down a bit of cash to get the better deals.

Even though it has the biggest upfront cost, we recommend the two-year commitment. Not only do you get the cheapest average price per month, but CyberGhost also throws in a few free additional months. If you are afraid of spending all that money and then having buyers regret, there is a 45-day money-back guarantee.

The six-month plan is good, but we’d only recommend it if you are taking a long trip overseas or a student who needs a VPN for your final semester. You could even split the cost with six other people since CyberGhost works on seven devices simultaneously with one subscription.

>>Check Out: Best VPNs for School in 2024

Aside from the VPN itself, you can opt to buy add-ons, like the CyberGhost Security Suite for $1 per month or $24 over the course of two years. This suite includes antivirus protection and a security updater, which basically scans your device’s programs and drivers and updates them automatically when updates become available. This tool is exclusively for Windows users.

We don’t recommend it though. Besides that it only works on Windows, it’s not as good as antivirus software from the top antivirus brands. CyberGhost specializes in VPNs; you’re better off getting malware protection from a brand that specializes in antiviruses.

What A CyberGhost Subscription Includes

Feature-wise, all CyberGhost plans offer the same functions and benefits. That is, they let you connect to one of CyberGhost’s 11,000 servers, encrypt your traffic, and hide your IP address. Here’s some more details of what CyberGhost has under the hood:

• Automatic kill switch
• Shared IP address for better anonymity
• Audited “no-logs” policy
• OpenVPN and WireGuard VPN protocols
• 256-bit AES (OpenVPN) and ChaCha20 (WireGuard) encryption
• Open access to streaming libraries around the world (Netflix, Hulu, Prime, etc.)
• Anonymous torrenting
• DNS, WebRTC, and IP leak protection
• 11,000 servers in 100 countries
• Seven simultaneous connections
• 24/7 live chat and email support

One of the features we believe CyberGhost should improve is the limit on simultaneous connections. While you can install the CyberGhost app on as many devices as you want, you can only connect up to seven devices at a time. That’s enough for most users, but when we tested CyberGhost, we weren’t satisfied with the connection limit. We like to keep all our devices connected to a VPN, and we have more than seven devices. If you’re like us, take a look at our Surfshark review. It offers unlimited simultaneous connections.

Referral Program

CyberGhost’s prices are set in stone, but there are things you can do to make it slightly more affordable or even earn free access. One we took advantage of was the referral program. Here’s how it works: Any paying customer gets a referral link. For every new user that buys a subscription through that link, CyberGhost gives both the link owner and the new user free 30 days of access. It’s a win-win-win; CyberGhost gets free advertising from you, you get a free VPN for 30 days, and your friend who signs up gets to try CyberGhost as well.

There are certain conditions that must be met. For example, you need to have an active subscription. There’s also a limit to how many referrals you can make – three for each user. Still, if you can invite three friends to use CyberGhost, that’s three months of free access in total. Not bad.

Payment Options

We had a wide variety of options to pay for CyberGhost, including Visa, Mastercard, American Express, PayPal, and Bitcoin. Personally, we used a credit card, but if you want a more secure and anonymous payment method, we recommend either PayPal or crypto.

The former lets you pay for the service without giving CyberGhost and its payment partner – Cleverbridge or Stripe, depending on where you live – your card details. PayPal is a safe payment service that can reduce the exposure of your payment information.

On the other hand, paying with cryptocurrency lets you stay anonymous, especially if you’re trying to hide that you’re buying a VPN. Crypto payments are harder to trace.

Is There a Free-Trial Period or Money-Back Guarantee?

There’s always risk in buying virtual products. What if you end up not liking it? What if it underdelivers? What if a better option comes along?

With CyberGhost, you have a couple of options. You can either enjoy a few days of free trial or cover your purchase with a money-back guarantee.

With the first option, you won’t have to put your card down to test the service. For this, you’ll need either a Windows or macOS computer, an Android smartphone or tablet, or an iOS device. The trial period also depends on which device you’ll use to sign up.

With the second option, you’d need to buy a subscription first, but you can get a refund if you cancel during a certain period. That’s called a money-back guarantee. Most VPNs offer one, but we find CyberGhost to be one of the more generous with its guarantee. That’s because it gives users up to 45 days to make up their mind, while most other VPNs give only 30 days. Those extra 15 days can be pivotal.

That said, the 45-day guarantee works only for long-term subscriptions (one-year or two-year). If you buy a monthly subscription, CyberGhost will give you only a 15-day guarantee. Still not bad.

To use the money-back guarantee, you would need to buy your CyberGhost subscription straight from the source: CyberGhost’s website.

>> Read More: The Best VPN Free Trials

How Can I Cancel My Subscription?

If for some reason you are not pleased with CyberGhost’s service, you can cancel your VPN subscription easily. Here’s how:

1. Log on to your CyberGhost account.
2. Navigate to My Subscriptions on the account dashboard.
3. Click Turn Auto-Renewal Off.

Your subscription will not end then and there. You also won’t get a prorated refund (unless you’re still within the money-back period). Instead, your subscription will remain active until the end of the subscription period that you paid for. That’s pretty standard in the industry, but we thought you should know.

Our Favorite Features

CyberGhost has a lot to offer; we’ve summarized our favorite features below.

• Headquartered in Romania: Romania is generally privacy-friendly. It’s not a part of the 14 Eyes alliance and it has pretty lax data retention laws. That means CyberGhost can freely uphold its “no-logs” policy – while your traffic passes through CyberGhost’s servers, no data that can compromise you is ever captured. That includes your online activities and your real IP address.
• Great customer service: CyberGhost offers a 24/7 live chat with super responsive customer service specialists. The specialists answered all the questions we had about CyberGhost’s payment options in a quick yet patient manner.
• Affordability: We spend a lot of time looking at VPNs, so we know a good deal when we see it. $2.29 a month is on the lower end of the cost spectrum, and even its most expensive monthly offering of $12.99 per month won’t break the bank. Top competitors such as NordVPN cost between $3.67 and $11.95 a month, so CyberGhost is right in that range.
• Kill switch: A kill switch shuts down all of the apps and web activity we have going on in the unlikely event that the VPN fails. While this didn’t happen while we were testing out CyberGhost, we like to prepare for the worst and were glad we didn’t have to worry about our activity being exposed, even if it was only for a moment.
• Expansive network: One of CyberGhost’s main selling points is its massive network of servers. When you connect to a VPN, your traffic is encrypted and routed through a VPN server, so a VPN’s server count is a good metric on which we can base a VPN’s potential performance. More servers equals better performance, in most cases. And with over 11,000 servers in 100 countries, CyberGhost has one of the largest fleets. Whether you’re looking to get a U.K. IP address or an IP address from Nepal, CyberGhost has servers for you.

• Strong encryption: CyberGhost uses AES-256 encryption for connections through the OpenVPN protocol, and ChaCha20 for WireGuard connections. Both meet market standards, but see our full CyberGhost review for our experience with each protocol. You can also read our guide on VPN protocols to see why OpenVPN and WireGuard are our top picks.
• Shared and anonymized IP addresses: When we connected to the Internet through CyberGhost, we shared an IP address with other “Ghosties,” which is what CyberGhost calls its customers. This feature made it difficult for hackers to pin down our activity to us, if they ever got past other security measures in place. CyberGhost also added an option to get a dedicated IP address for an additional $4 per month, in the event that we weren’t willing to share.
• Ability to torrent: We torrented files and shared them directly with our colleagues using the VPN just by clicking the Torrent Anonymously button. It couldn’t have been easier, and the files for our video reviews were transferred to our team members without a hitch.
• Can watch Netflix: We’re all hopelessly addicted to Netflix. For us, being able to stream our favorite TV shows and movies is non-negotiable, and luckily, we could watch Netflix while connected to CyberGhost.
• Widely compatible: We used CyberGhost on all of our different devices, browsers, and gaming systems. That consisted of Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, Chrome, Firefox, Amazon Fire TV Stick, Android TV, Apple TV, Xbox One, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and PlayStation 4. While CyberGhost’s software and hardware provided versatility, it also earned the third-place slot in our competition for the best VPN for Chrome, second only to formidable opponent ExpressVPN. It also ranked in our top five best VPNs for Fire TV Stick.
• Can connect up to seven devices at the same time: We tend to go from screen to screen, so it’s important that our protection isn’t interrupted (that’s the whole point of a VPN, after all)! From our phones to our laptops to our tablets to our Fire TV Stick, we never want our web activity to be exposed to surveillance, and CyberGhost covers us well.

Privacy

CyberGhost is a no-logs VPN, which means it doesn’t log browsing data that can be traced back to individual users. This has been proven by the third-party audit conducted recently by Deloitte, one of the biggest global auditing firms.

CyberGhost does, however, collect IP address information in an anonymized format. It also collects personal information from users, such as names, email addresses, usernames, and payment information, but these are necessary pieces of information in maintaining the service.

Also, CyberGhost kept information such as what country we browsed from, what browser and device we used, and when we used the VPN. It didn’t keep track of anything related to our web traffic, or what we did while we used the VPN.1 While it logged all our information anonymously, it did track more information than we would have liked. However, when it comes to keeping our information hidden from the bad guys, CyberGhost does its job, which is what counts.

In Summary

CyberGhost is a great VPN that competes with its pricier competitors. It covered all the necessities of a VPN, like creating a secure internet connection that protected our web activity, without sacrificing too much of our internet speed. Its sprawling network of servers gave us lots of options for connectivity, with a server location in 100 countries.

With a price range between $2.37 and $12.99 a month, CyberGhost is affordable, especially compared to ExpressVPN pricing, which starts at $99 for a 15-month subscription. Two years with CyberGhost costs just $56.94, and it even includes up to three months of free VPN.

All things considered, as one of the most affordable VPNs on the market, it’s hard to say no to CyberGhost, and we’d highly recommend it to our readers.

If you want to compare it to other top VPNs, read our comparisons of ExpressVPN vs. CyberGhost or NordVPN vs. CyberGhost. Or, check out CyberGhost deals to see how much you can save.