Is NordVPN Still Worth It in 2026? My Six Month Check In

Every VPN review on the internet sounds like an ad, so let me start with the thing the ads skip. If you pay monthly, NordVPN costs 14.99 dollars a month, which is silly. The entire value story lives in the 2 year plan, where the Basic tier drops to 3.49 dollars a month. I signed up on that plan six months ago and this is my honest check in.

Speed, the part that matters

My rule for a VPN is simple. If I notice it, it failed. Connected to a nearby Singapore server, my connection holds roughly 96 percent of its normal speed, which matches the independent testing average of around 82 percent retention across all distances. Streaming in 4K, video calls, large downloads, none of it stutters. Connect to a server on the other side of the planet and you will feel it, with speeds dropping to roughly half, but that is physics more than product.

The network is genuinely huge now, over 8,600 servers across 149 countries, so there is always a fast exit nearby. Everything runs on RAM-only servers, meaning nothing survives a reboot, which is the kind of privacy design I want rather than just a promise in a policy document.

Features I actually use, and ones I do not

Threat Protection quietly blocks trackers, malicious sites and some ads, and it works well enough that I leave it on. Meshnet lets me route traffic through my own devices, handy exactly twice in six months when I needed to appear as my home connection while traveling. Split tunneling exists on Windows and Android but not on iPhone or Mac, which is an Apple platform limitation and still annoying in practice.

Two more gripes. Ten simultaneous devices sounds like plenty until a family shares one account. And like every VPN, the renewal price after your discounted term is much higher than what you paid going in, so set a calendar reminder and renegotiate or hop when the term ends.