> Is this because as a VPN they're committed to privacy?
Almost certainly. Mullvad is way out there when it comes to privacy. They recently got rid of recurring subscriptions because they said they didn't want to store any PII.
Almost certainly. Mullvad is way out there when it comes to privacy. They recently got rid of recurring subscriptions because they said they didn't want to store any PII.
It's very unusual. The vast majority focus primarily on getting this to work as friction-less as possible.
as much as this may be a noble goal, as a user i want to have the option of a recurring subscription, especially if i pay monthly (which i prefer to, unless i'm really committed to a service or the yearly subscription is cheap enough that i'm sure i won't regret it). if it's just one or two services doing this it's not a huge deal, but imagine getting emails from tens of different services each month to renew, especially if you have to log in and enter your credit/debit card details on each one separately. is there a reason they can't simply store a token from stripe/paypal/etc, or is that still considered PII?
They do still accept those payment methods, and that is exactly what they do for them[0], but recurring payments forced them to retain that data for longer than they were comfortable with, and they decided that the cost to privacy outweighed the convenience recurring subscriptions offered[1].
Another thing to note is that you won't be getting any e-mails from them reminding you to renew your plan, since they never had your e-mail in the first place (Mullvad "accounts" are anonymous numeric tokens).
[0] https://mullvad.net/en/help/no-logging-data-policy/#payments
[1] https://mullvad.net/en/blog/2022/6/20/were-removing-the-opti...