Paid Proton VPN or Mullvad: what made you move in either direction? VPN

They optimise for different things and the bundle is a real argument. Mullvad's pitch is the account model: a random account number, no email required, flat EUR 5 a month with no tiers or upsells, and five devices. If you already pay for a mail suite, the marginal cost of the tunnel in that bundle is small and switching means paying twice for overlapping things. I run Mullvad because I like the billing model, not because the packets arrive differently.

The serious-choice framing usually means "published audits and minimal account data", both of which are legitimate criteria. Read the actual audit scope rather than the badge on the homepage though, because some cover the apps, some cover the infrastructure, and some cover the no-logs claim, and those are very different assurances.

For your three listed uses, streaming from abroad is the only one where the choice bites, and it bites in an unglamorous way: the provider with more effort spent on unblocking will work more often and neither will promise it. If that is a genuine requirement, test it during a trial or a single paid month before you move anything. Nothing else in your list distinguishes them.

Switched last year and the only thing I regret is losing the single bill. Not a technical complaint, just that I now have four small subscriptions instead of two and one of them renewed in a month I had forgotten about.

If the hotel-network use is the frequent one, care about the app quality on the platform you use in a hurry, and about whether the kill switch fails closed on a flaky captive portal. That has caused me more grief than any difference in the underlying service.