Vidar

If the goal is only to change your IP and come out in another country, I would skip the ready made VPN entirely and put WireGuard or OpenVPN on a one dollar VPS yourself. The IP is then yours, nobody else is on it, and you can move the server whenever you want. And if the actual requirement is ten or twenty different IPs at a dollar each, ready made VPN accounts are the wrong shape altogether, there are VPS and IP providers built for that.

Yes, and those are two different jobs. Changing your IP is not anonymity. If the requirement is a Korean address or a Turkish one, your own box is strictly better. If the requirement is that nobody can tie the traffic to you, it is strictly worse.

There is a real version of this that ships as hardware for a few hundred, which rather settles whether a phone can do it.

Agreed on where the fault sits, but the review lands on the app anyway, and it is the app that can fix it. Prompting for an offline recovery path during setup costs one screen and moves the whole failure mode.

Once, yes. Monthly, no. It is a utility that should keep working when the company stops existing, and a subscription is the wrong shape for that promise.