We test Mozilla’s new Wireguard-based $5/mo VPN service

Mozilla, the open source company best known for the Firefox Web browser, made its VPN service generally available in the United States this month. The cross-platform VPN is based on Wireguard and delivered in partnership with well-known and especially techie-friendly VPN provider Mullvad. Mullvad itself was, to the best of our knowledge, the first publicly available VPN provider to offer Wireguard support back in 2017.

The Mozilla VPN service costs $4.95 per month and offers server endpoints in 30-plus countries. It currently has VPN clients available for Windows 10, Android, and iOS—but users of other operating systems, such as MacOS and Linux, are going to have to wait. Mozilla says that support for MacOS and Linux is coming soon—but unfortunately, even if you're an advanced user who understands Wireguard configs, you can't just roll your own connection now.

The service authenticates via Firefox cloud account. When you sign up for a Mozilla VPN subscription, you'll be asked to create a Firefox account if you don't already have one. The Firefox account is an SSO (Single Sign On) service which uses oauth2, much like a Google account—but it's not tied to a Google account, so even if you sign up using a Gmail address tied to an Android device, that device won't be automatically logged in.

Aside from the Firefox-based oauth2 integration, Mozilla's VPN appears to effectively be a Mullvad VPN, with a different client application and different billing entity. It is a bit less expensive through Mozilla, though—Mullvad costs €5 per month. This makes Mozilla's offering about $0.80 per month cheaper, at current exchange rates.

Before we go any further, we need to make something clear—we've repeatedly said that Ars Technica, as editorial policy, does not and cannot specifically recommend any public VPN service provider. While Mozilla does put its own stamp of approval on Mullvad's policies, we have neither sufficient access nor resources to audit those claims ourselves. Readers will need to decide for themselves whether Mozilla's endorsement and partnership constitutes sufficient assurances for their own level of privacy and security needs.

Readers who want a publicly available VPN service and a somewhat higher level of potential privacy might consider bypassing Mozilla and going directly to Mullvad. The Mozilla VPN service must be tied to a working email address and paid for with a credit card. By contrast, Mullvad accounts have no identifying information besides the account number itself, and they can be paid for with bitcoin—or even literal cash in a mailed-in envelope.

We don't have any better way to guarantee Mullvad's internal policies and handling than Mozilla's, of course—but never collecting a user's real-world information in the first place is a pretty solid start on the privacy game