Why I Keep Tinkering With Private Internet Access: A Developer’s Six-Month Speed Test

Twelve subscriptions. That's how many VPN services I've paid for out of my own pocket since my employer disclosed a third-party data breach back in 2023, each one put through its own network security check instead of taken on faith. Only one of those twelve ever made me want to go read its actual source code instead of trusting the marketing page, and that's Private Internet Access, which is the subject of this VPN comparison and, by a wide margin, the most open-source-software-friendly option I've run as a daily driver.

Before anything else: this site runs on affiliate links, and if you sign up for a VPN through one of mine, I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That arrangement doesn't change what I write (I'd rather lose a commission than recommend something I wouldn't use myself) — I only cover services I've bought and tested myself, PIA included.

My time with Private Internet Access (PIA) started after I'd already spent months on NordVPN, which I still think is the better pick for someone who wants a VPN that gets out of the way. The specifics are in my six-month NordVPN test results. What pulled me toward PIA was wanting more knobs to turn than Nord's one-click simplicity offers. PIA markets itself as the choice for "power users," and after running it as my primary tunnel for the better part of six months, I think that label is accurate in ways that are both a compliment and a quiet warning.

Open Source, Kape Technologies, and the Network Security Habit I Can't Shake

I have a bias toward anything I can inspect myself, which probably traces back to the first time I thought I'd solved privacy on my own. For a while I relied on Chrome's incognito mode, genuinely believing it kept my IP address hidden from the sites I visited. It does nothing of the sort — incognito just stops your own browser from remembering the visit, and any server-side log I've ever worked with could see straight through it. That's roughly the moment I stopped trusting convenience features and started wanting to read the code behind whatever I installed.

One of PIA's biggest selling points is that its apps are fully open source on every platform. There's a specific kind of reassurance in scrolling through a GitHub repo and seeing the actual implementation of the kill switch rather than a marketing paragraph describing what it probably does. PIA's kill switch is open source too, so I never had to take anyone's word for what happens if the tunnel drops. I caught myself staring at that "open source" badge one evening (at an hour I won't disclose), genuinely wondering if I was the only person actually reading the commit history, or if everyone else just takes it at face value.

It's also important to know PIA is owned by Kape Technologies, the same parent company behind ExpressVPN and CyberGhost VPN. Some people in the privacy community get uneasy about that kind of consolidation under one roof, and that's a fair instinct. I tend to look at what the software actually does. If you want the server-count side of that comparison, I laid it out in comparing Private Internet Access and CyberGhost server counts. For me, the deciding factor was PIA's commitment to the WireGuard protocol.

WireGuard is a relief after years of dealing with bloated legacy VPN code. It runs on roughly 4,000 lines of code, versus the 100,000-plus lines behind OpenVPN, which makes it dramatically easier for anyone to audit. When I'm trying to figure out why my home NAS is dragging, a leaner protocol means fewer variables to rule out before I find the actual problem.

Does a 35,000-Server Network Actually Solve Anything?

PIA advertises a network north of 35,000 servers, which sounds like an obvious win against almost any competitor on paper. A few weeks into running it full time, though, I'd learned that more servers don't automatically mean a simpler experience. It's a bit like shopping for a wifi router; eight antennas on the box doesn't guarantee the signal reaches your basement if the firmware behind it is flaky.

Some of the less common server locations were hit-or-miss for streaming in my testing, while the US nodes stayed consistently fast. If your main goal is a VPN that just works for everyday streaming without any fiddling, Surfshark tends to be the more forgiving pick. Unlimited devices and less patience required to find a server that behaves.

For a power user, though, having that many servers means there's almost always a lower-latency hop available if you're willing to go looking for it. One Saturday near Pike Place Market, waiting in a coffee line with nothing better to do, I pulled up the app just to see how a Tokyo server would perform over the café's wifi, nudging MTU settings to shave a few milliseconds off the connection. A friend of mine who spends his weekends homebrewing IPAs and babysitting a kegerator in his garage watched me do this once and asked, with total sincerity, why anyone would bother. PIA asks you to accept control in exchange for effort. The control is real, but so is the effort it demands.

Watching Control Turn Into a Chore

The real core of the PIA experience is how much you get to customize. Most VPNs hand you a protocol choice and maybe a kill switch toggle and call it a day. PIA lets you choose your encryption level outright, between AES-128 and AES-256. That mattered more than I expected for my local setup. Dropping to AES-128 for file transfers across my own NAS gave me a noticeable speed bump without giving up meaningful protection for that specific, low-stakes traffic. It's a narrow use case, but for a developer who likes tuning things, it's a real win.

That same granularity comes with a maintenance tax, though. On one rainy evening, my partner asked, not thrilled, why the Netflix homepage had suddenly switched to German. I'd been running latency checks against European nodes and forgot to reset the exit location afterward. It took me about ten minutes to realize what I'd done while she just wanted to watch her show. Unlike the premium hand-holding I described in the ExpressVPN tax, PIA will not quietly protect you from your own settings.

The low point of my six months came when I was adjusting the global kill switch mid-afternoon and triggered it by accident, which knocked my partner's work laptop offline in the middle of her quarterly presentation. The look on her face when she had to tether to her phone mid-call is a debt I am still paying off in chores. Sharing a network with someone who has zero interest in VPN settings is where PIA's flexibility turns into a genuine liability.

What Eight Weeks of DNS Leak Checks Actually Told Me

About eight weeks into running PIA as my only tunnel, I ran a DNS leak test mostly out of habit rather than any real worry. The results came up across three monitors, each nudged to a slightly different brightness because I'd never bothered to match them, throwing uneven stripes of light over the desk at that hour. Every resolver it checked traced back to Private Internet Access infrastructure, not to my internet provider. The first time that result had ever come back that clean for me. It wasn't dramatic. It was just a page of IP addresses that, for once, had nothing to do with my provider.

None of that matters without a clear sense of what you're actually defending against, which is its own question I keep returning to separately. Whether my ISP does any shaping or classification on encrypted tunnel traffic is a related rabbit hole I've chased down in more detail elsewhere; here, I'll just say the DNS result was the thing that finally let me stop checking obsessively.

A reader named Darby Kuang emailed me a while back after going through my split-tunneling guide, flagging that their home NAS was still reachable from its public IP even with the VPN supposedly routing everything. When I offered a quick fix, they pushed back, politely but firmly, pointing out that it wouldn't hold up the same way on an actual office network with its own routing rules. That exchange is a good reminder that a lot of VPN advice, including PIA's own no-logs claims, holds up differently depending on whether you're testing on a home setup or something closer to enterprise infrastructure.

The Features That Are Actually Worth the Learning Curve

Beyond the encryption controls, PIA includes MACE, its built-in ad and tracker blocker that works at the DNS level. Similar in spirit to how NordVPN handles things on its side, which I get into more in best VPN for threat protection. MACE works, but it's a blunt instrument (on or off, nothing in between), which feels like an odd gap in an app this configurable everywhere else.

I spent a fair amount of time with the multi-hop option too, which routes traffic through two servers instead of one. It's overkill for most people, but for someone who got serious about privacy after a data breach, it's a reasonable feature to keep in the back pocket for anything that feels higher-stakes. PIA doesn't offer anything resembling mesh networking for linking your own devices together, which is the one gap that almost pulled me toward a different provider's meshnet feature instead. Port forwarding is in there too, though I've only used it for the occasional large file transfer, and a dedicated IP add-on isn't part of the lineup. Not something I miss, since my remote-access needs are already covered elsewhere.

Protocol choice is its own topic I've written about at length separately, so I'll skip rehashing it here, and the same goes for whether a browser-only proxy extension would suit you better than a full system tunnel. For my setup, tunneling every app at once wins every time. The PIA feature I lean on constantly, though, is unlimited simultaneous connections on one account, which matters more than it sounds once you're counting a work laptop, a personal laptop, a phone, and a home server all wanting a tunnel at the same time. I've thought about pushing PIA down to the router itself so every device on the network inherits it automatically, but that project is still sitting half-finished in my head.

So Who Should Actually Run This VPN?

After running this as my daily driver for the better part of six months, following the same testing methodology I use for every comparison on this site, I've landed on a clear read. Private Internet Access suits people who treat their home network like a production environment. If reading commit histories, tweaking MTU settings, and deliberately downgrading encryption for a specific performance gain sounds appealing rather than exhausting, this is your VPN. The lesson that actually stuck with me: match the VPN to how many people share your network, not just to your own curiosity. Mine taught me that the slow way, with a kill switch mishap and an afternoon of accidental German Netflix that most households wouldn't have signed up for.

If granular control and full transparency through open-source apps are what you're after, Private Internet Access is the one to get. Current pricing shifts often enough that it's worth checking their site directly rather than trusting a number I quote here. But if you want a "set it and forget it" VPN where the TV just works and the interface doesn't require a decoder ring, NordVPN or the 45-day money-back window on CyberGhost is probably the safer bet for a shared household. As for me, I'll keep tinkering.