SpyOff Reviews

SpyOFF is a VPN service offered by Sareta S.r.l, a company headquartered in the Republic of San Marino. Although they are settled in Italian lands, both the website and the desktop app we tested were clearly made to please a German-speaking user since this is the only language available besides English. SpyOFF offers a decent VPN that will allow you to circumvent all kinds of geo-blocks, besides granting you an anonymous and more secure web browsing experience thanks to solid encryption, despite there being few protocol choices available. This German-speaking Italian VPN provider boasts support for different devices and operating systems, including computers, mobile devices and the always handy router purchase option for an extra extensive protection. A 15-day free trial account isn’t such a rare sight in the VPN world, but one that gives you access to the complete service, including all servers, isn’t very common. If you decide to subscribe after this trial you get to choose between three paid subscription packs with discounts available.

SpyOFF can be considered a simple VPN service as its features the main components we would expect from a fairly decent program. Although there are no over the top super exclusive features that you won’t find anywhere else, the company commits to providing a more generally-known and easy to use service. Considering this, they surely deliver as setup is easy and the Windows desktop app we tried runs without major bumps. That said, it could happen that all other features present in the client are blocked when you are connected to a certain server, and all you can do is disconnect from it.

Full access for free

This is probably the biggest point in favor of SpyOFF, and one that we congratulate the company for. Your 15-day free trial account will get you access to the entire service, unlimited bandwidth and data transfer included, therefore, there are no features blocked for paid subscriptions only and the entire server network is available from the start. This way you have more than enough time to figure your way around things and, by the time your free trial ends, If you decide to invest in this VPN at least you know what you’re buying.

Simple interface and useful settings

SpyOFF’s VPN network is not the greatest we’ve ever seen, despite still having a considerable amount of servers worldwide. Featuring around 300 servers in 21 countries, you’ll have about 14,000 IP addresses to connect to. A nice little detail that this VPN provider holds is the fact that, while on the desktop app, when you’re searching for servers you can see that all of them tell you their respective ping, a useful feature that will save you time. You can also filter servers by “Ultra Secure”, “Balanced” and “Highspeed”.

We’ve run a couple of tests to assess the speed of their servers and found out that European servers feature decently acceptable speeds probably due to their proximity to SpyOFF’s headquarters and this reviewer’s. The major downside we found though was the fact that overseas servers, such as U.S. and Australian ones (the ones we tested) have lousy speeds, way below acceptable standards, and ridiculously high pings. We understand that overseas servers are harder ones to obtain decent stable connections from, but still, their server network’s speed in general is very disappointing.

Another issue we found by accident is the fact that some server information is inaccurate. In short, all servers we tried to connect to in Singapore, for example, ended up attributing us an American IP address and server, and the same happened for South Korean servers. Just out of curiosity we’ve run speed tests on this Singaporean/American server and on a server carrying an American flag, and results were similar.

After a bumpy ride on the server network we arrive on a more peaceful field. In fact, there aren’t any major issues regarding privacy protection that we could point fingers for at SpyOFF, although there is room for improvement here as well. SpyOFF protects you information with strong 256-bit SSL encryption besides letting you choose your protocol. Here your options are OpenVPN (TCP/UDP), PP2P and L2TP. This VPN offers DNS leak protection but, only after establishing a connection. As for the negative points, besides promising a no-log usage of their services, a quick look through their privacy policy page lets you discover that Sareta S.r.l stores the URL referrer, your IP address, date and time of usage. Also, data is indeed saved due to legal obligations and only deleted if these obligations are terminated, besides collecting your personal information for billing purposes.

Regarding device and operating system support the good news is that SpyOFF features extensive support with dedicated apps for Windows – 7, 8 and 10 – macOS, Android, iOS – iPad and iPhone – and Linux Ubuntu with the possibility of using multiple logins under the same account. Also, we salute the partnership with FlashRouters that lets you purchase a DD-WRT fully configurable router and extend your protection to an unlimited number of devices. This will only get you the router itself though, as a SpyOFF subscription is not included and must be acquired separately.

As we already covered, the free trial account will provide you 15 days of free full access to the complete service without any restrictions whatsoever. SpyOFF begins by offering three different subscription periods. The first one, called Starter, will give you the exact same access to all servers in 21 countries, full bandwidth and unlimited data transfer that you have in the free account with a cost of $11.23 per month billed monthly. Next, the Premium plan will cost you $7.86 per month and, once again, gives you full access with a 30% annual discounted price compared to monthly single payments since this one is billed yearly ($94.32 per year). Just like the latter, the Premium Plus is also billed yearly with a cost of $12.35 per month – something like $148.20 per year – offering two extra features power users will appreciate. It boasts 1GB of Usenet access and tips and tricks for fully exploiting the service, in addition to the same full access as the other packs.

Please note that all the aforementioned prices were converted by us to American dollars since SpyOFF only allows payments in euros. These payments can be done using credit cards, direct debit, PayPal and Bitcoin. Besides the last three not being shown as a payment method on the pricing page, they seem to be assured since they are listed in the terms of service.

It’s clear that this provider is taking its first steps into the world of VPNs as the website and overall service leave an unfinished impression. There are the server inaccuracies, the language barrier on both the site and apps, and other aspects that show that there is still quite a long road to be covered. This doesn’t mean you should discard this provider right away, though. All of the aforementioned shows that there’s room for improvement as quality and good intentions are there. Features like the useful kill switch, server filtering in the desktop app, the fact that these show you their ping right away and the expert guide setup are all aspects that work in favor of SpyOFF and that, if polished, can turn this into a first line VPN service.