Cheap VPN Tiers Compared: What You Get for Under ¥10, ¥20 and ¥30 a Month

The hard numbers behind all three tiers

Numbers first, experience second. The three figures below are the actual tiers on the plans page — not estimates, and with none of the crossed-out “original price” games.

Only two variables separate the tiers: the monthly price and the data allowance. The route pool, the clients and the account system are not split by tier — in other words, what you pay for is the allowance, not whether the service works. That matters, because plenty of cheap plans work the opposite way: a low headline price first, then a crowded node group to go with it.

Alongside the three monthly tiers there is a separate set of data packs that do not reset monthly: ¥158 / 300GB, ¥358 / 1000GB and ¥658 / 3000GB, bought outright and never expiring. They sit outside the three-tier monthly line, but for people whose usage swings up and down they are often better value — covered separately in section three.

Where the Savings Actually Come From

Two services can both say “low price” while their cost structures look nothing alike. Prices are usually pushed down in one of three ways; knowing which one a provider chose tells you what you will pay for it.

Overselling: Bandwidth Is Rented, Not Bought

Providers rent international bandwidth by the month, so the cost is fixed. Sell a 10Gbps port to 300 people and you can still advertise 100Mbps each — as long as they are not online at the same time. During the day the numbers look great; between 8 and 11 p.m., when everyone connects at once, the queue forms.

Overselling rarely shows up as a total failure to connect. It shows up as slow video start-up, a laggy first byte on web pages, and a speed test that looks great one second and collapses the next. For scale: Netflix's own recommendation is about 5 Mbps for 1080p and about 25 Mbps for 4K. A route squeezed down to 3 Mbps will buffer even at 1080p. Usable peak-hour bandwidth matters far more than a headline peak figure.

How Widely the Exit IP Is Shared

Cheap tiers often put several hundred users behind a single exit IP. The consequence is usually not speed but risk scoring: streaming platforms and some websites treat “many accounts from one IP” as a proxy signature, so you connect fine yet see the wrong regional catalogue, or get hit with captchas again and again. That is also why different tiers from the same provider can unblock differently — the variable is exit quality, not the protocol.

Support Hours and How Deep Tickets Go

A cheap plan does not necessarily mean no support, but it may mean support only during fixed hours, leaving you to leave a message and wait. That is not fatal, but before paying, think about one thing: will your problem happen when nobody is on duty? Refund terms belong in the same category, and section five below gives a checklist you can verify directly against the page.

Data Reset Rules: Monthly vs Never Expiring

All three monthly tiers reset on your activation date each month, not on the 1st of the calendar month. That detail is handy for planning: activate on the 15th and your allowance clears on the 15th of the next month, so you never buy at month-end and lose it days later. It also means you do not have to time your purchase around a billing cycle.

Data packs work on a different logic: ¥158 / 300GB, ¥358 / 1000GB and ¥658 / 3000GB, bought outright, never reset, valid until used up. Neither model is inherently better — it depends on the shape of your usage curve.

When Monthly Billing Wins

• Your monthly usage is steady and lands close to the allowance: an hour or two of video every day, for example, uses up 60GB or 250GB almost exactly, with nothing wasted.
• You need to stay online for long stretches: with a desktop, tablet and mobile all connected, the monthly reset rhythm is simpler and you never have to watch a balance.
• You want to test the water cheaply: the lowest monthly tier is the least expensive way to find out, and with the refund window the risk is close to zero.

When Data Packs Win

• Your usage swings: business trips, travel, short-term projects — 200GB one month, 5GB the next.
• You do not want a reset date pushing you around: data packs have no settlement day, and every gigabyte counts whenever you use it.
• Many devices, light use: with no device limit on the account, a few devices each using a little now and then makes a monthly allowance easy to waste.

A concrete way to decide: if you actually use around 40GB a month, roughly 20GB of the ¥9.9 / 60GB allowance goes unused every month, which adds up to real waste over time — and that is exactly the portion a data pack preserves. Conversely, if you use the full allowance every month, the three monthly tiers cost less per GB than data packs, and the bigger the pack the cheaper each GB gets: the ¥658 / 3000GB option is built for long-term heavy users.

Route Type Affects Your Experience More Than Protocol Names

The string of protocol names in a client — Shadowsocks, VMess, Trojan, VLESS, Hysteria2, TUIC — is often marketed as a selling point. They do differ, but mainly in resistance to blocking and handshake overhead; they do not determine how much bandwidth you get. What decides your peak-hour experience is the route type.

Direct connection

The client connects straight to an overseas node over the public internet the whole way. It is the cheapest option and feels fine during the day, but jitter is most obvious at peak hours when cross-border public networks congest. This is the most common type in cheap plans, and there is nothing wrong with it — the problem is not being told that is what you bought.

Relay

Traffic reaches a domestic entry server first, then crosses the border to the exit node. The entry leg uses optimised routing, which is generally steadier than a direct connection at the cost of one extra hop and slightly higher latency. How stable a relay is depends on whether the entry bandwidth is oversold too, so the word “relay” on its own guarantees nothing.

IEPL dedicated line

An enterprise-grade Ethernet private line: data travels on the dedicated circuit rather than competing on the public internet. Packet loss and jitter at peak hours are noticeably lower, and the cost is noticeably higher, so it usually appears only in mid- to high-priced plans or is flagged as its own node type in the list. When choosing a provider, check first whether the node list labels route types: if all it says is “high-speed node”, you have no way to tell which kind you are buying.

Here is how to read the real differences: Shadowsocks and Trojan are lightweight with low handshake overhead; Hysteria2 and TUIC are built on QUIC and hold up better on lossy routes, but lean harder on your device's CPU; VMess and VLESS are two formats from the V2Ray family, with VLESS the leaner of the two. All of this affects how reliably you stay connected, not how much data you have.

Split Tunnelling: The One Feature Cheap Tiers Should Always Turn On

Split tunnelling decides which traffic goes through the proxy and which connects directly. Sending domestic sites and apps direct saves data and cuts latency. On the 60GB tier this rule is worth more than any node switch: domestic caches for video sites, system updates and app store downloads will genuinely eat your allowance if they are not split out.

How to Verify the Connection Yourself

No tools to install — three commands are enough to see what your exit looks like. The block below can be pasted straight into a terminal.

# 1. Exit IP: should show the route's location, not your local ISP
curl -s https://ipinfo.io/ip

# 2. DNS exit: see which network your resolution requests leave from
dig +short whoami.akamai.net

# 3. Cloudflare's view: the loc field is where it thinks you are
curl -s https://www.cloudflare.com/cdn-cgi/trace

The exit IP from the first command should sit in the region you selected. The address returned by the second should belong to the route side; if resolution points to your local ISP, that is a DNS leak — some domain lookups are not going through the tunnel and are exposed on the local network, and they may also steer you to cache nodes chosen by your local position. The third shows where Cloudflare thinks you are: if the loc field does not match your node's region, the route's exit is being identified as a proxy.

Support, Refunds and Signup Requirements: Where Cheap Plans Cut Corners

A low price does not mean bad service, but support and refunds are the easiest things to quietly trim, because they do not affect whether you connect — only how you feel when something goes wrong. The points below can be checked against the page directly, without asking support.

• ✅ The refund window is stated openly: VPNDM offers a 14-day no-questions refund, written on the page, with no back-and-forth with support.
• ✅ Low signup barrier: no email address required, so nothing is left behind at signup and there is one less piece of information that could be dragged away.
• ✅ Payment methods match local habits: Alipay, WeChat and USDT are all supported, so paying does not turn into a chore.
• ✅ No device cap: unlimited devices, so you never buy a second plan just to add one more device.
• ❌ “Refunds available” with no number of days: a refund clause without a deadline is essentially no clause at all.
• ❌ Top up a balance first, then buy a plan with it: when something goes wrong, the refund path takes a long detour.
• ❌ A node list that gives only region names and no route types: you cannot tell whether you are buying a dedicated line or a public direct connection.

Choosing a Tier by Scenario: A Four-Step Check

Condensed into four steps. Work through them in order and you will rarely pick wrong.

1. Work out your monthly usage. Open the data statistics on your device and look at the real numbers. Estimate video at about 2GB per hour for 1080p (matching Netflix's recommended 5 Mbps); web, email and social are close to negligible.
2. Look at when you use it. If most of your usage falls between 8 and 11 p.m., check route types and node labels before data allowances — losing speed at peak hours hurts more than having 100GB less.
3. Count your devices. Desktops, tablets, mobiles, TV boxes — all of them. With a provider that has no device limit, this step only needs confirming once, not recalculating.
4. Match yourself to a tier. Under 50GB a month, mostly web and social: take the under-¥10 tier. An hour or two of video a day on two or three devices: take the ¥20 tier. Shared across several devices with frequent HD streaming: take the ¥30 tier. Usage that swings and no wish to be tied to reset rules: take a data pack.

One more thing worth confirming, and easily overlooked: whether cheap tiers draw on the same route pool or are split into a separate node group. In the first case you are buying an allowance; in the second you are buying an allowance plus a difference in routes. Neither model is wrong, but the price means something completely different.

Three Common Questions

Is the under-¥10 tier really enough?

Whether it is enough depends on how much video you watch, not on the price. 60GB covers low-traffic use such as web, email, social and maps; start watching video every day and you will hit the ceiling. The test is simple: buy the lowest tier for one month and see what is left at the end. More than half remaining means this is your tier; used up by mid-month means it is time to move up one.

Does cheap mean throttled?

Not necessarily throttled, but quite possibly queued. Throttling is a deliberate act; queueing is the natural result of overselling. Both feel like slower peak hours — the difference is that one is policy and the other is capacity. The test is the same: measure at peak hours for three days straight and watch jitter, not peaks.

What do the extra yuan buy between the ¥20 and ¥30 tiers?

You get double the data ceiling (250GB to 500GB) and more comfortable multi-device use. With one device and two hours a day, 250GB is already hard to exhaust; with a TV box, a desktop and a mobile all online at home, 500GB of headroom means you stop checking your usage every day. Conversely, if your real usage stays under 100GB, the extra money buys no perceptible improvement.

One last note: this three-tier comparison only holds within a single provider. When comparing across providers, line up route types, data reset rules, refund windows and signup requirements first, then compare prices — otherwise you are comparing two different things.