Best early Black Friday VPN deals 2022: Surfshark, Proton, and more available now

Atlas VPN is a solid service from top to bottom with native app support for all of the most popular devices and operating systems. It also has a handful of additional features you may find useful, including split tunneling, a data breach scanner, and a blocker for ads, trackers, and malware. 

To get the cheapest average monthly price you'll need to subscribe to the two-year plan, which has an upfront cost of $49.19. This is the same lump-sum payment you'd pay for the regular non-sale price, but the Black Friday deal comes with six additional months for free, which brings the monthly cost down to $1.64.

In my review of Surfshark VPN, I found it to have the speed, performance, and security of other top VPNs, but at a fraction of the cost. It has apps for Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and others, so you'll have no problem setting it up on just about any laptop or mobile device.

The savings on this deal (11%) is under the threshold for what ZDNET typically considers a good deal. However, this is a lower price than the usual offer for one of the cheapest VPNs, so it's worth at least giving Surfshark VPN a test run if you're interested. 

Private Internet Access VPN's two-year plan is 2.03/mo with this deal, which comes with four free months. In the past, there was a three-year plan for $2.03/mo, which cost $79, so you'll pay 28% less upfront ($56.84) with this offer. But compared to the most recent two-year plan, which cost $2.19/mo and came with two free months, you're saving 8% with this sale.

Private Internet Access has open-source customizable apps which allow you to configure settings for port forwarding, remote ports, proxies, and more. A single subscription can support 10 simultaneous connections on a wide range of devices running Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, and more.

The Swiss-based Proton VPN is an excellent service with unbeatable privacy and security features. It's fast and easy to use. And Proton VPN is always developing new features to stay at the forefront of cyber security. It recently rolled out what it calls Stealth VPN, which is a VPN protocol that obscures your VPN connection and helps to bypass government censorship.

Proton VPN isn't trying to be a budget service and I've rarely seen special deals for its premium service. If you can't justify $3.99 per month, it does have a useful free VPN service that has no data limits.

Hide.me VPN is an independently owned service with a no-log policy and 75 server locations. It supports a number of VPN protocols that vary depending on the platform, but include WireGuard, OpenVPN, SoftEther, SSTP, and IKEv2. Hide.me VPN also has other useful features such as split tunneling, and double VPN. 

In the past, Hide.me has offered two-year plans, which had a lower monthly cost than the current $3.99/mo offer. However, right now I'm only finding annual plans, and this deal is priced lower than previous one-year subscriptions.

For these Black Friday VPN deals, we only considered reputable and trustworthy VPN providers. There are no shortages of VPNs out there, but there is a limited number of companies that provide secure and user-friendly VPNs.

Finding true VPN deals can be a bit tricky because the prices change frequently and with various subscription lengths and add-ons, it gets convoluted. Most VPNs charge less for longer subscriptions and the standard price for service is often advertised as a huge discount. But if the VPN is always available for 63% off, then I don't consider that a sale. For the offers listed in this roundup, I based the discounted price on what I'd consider the standard offer rather than an imaginary inflated price that you'll never have to pay.

We didn't include free VPNs in our roundup because free VPN services are a mixed bag. It takes money to run a VPN and if you're not paying then you could be bombarded with ads or stuck with a subpar service. That's in the best-case scenario. The worst free VPNs could make money by selling your data, so it's best to stick with a paid service if you're taking your privacy and security seriously.

ZDNET scoured Black Friday sales to find the best deals by category at different retailers: