Proton VPN's Black Friday deal cuts its price by 75% – and secures your traffic via a military base

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Proton VPN is keeping the Black Friday VPN sales season rolling with a massive 75% discount on its 2-year plan. That slashes the price to just $2.49 a month ($59.76 total), making it one of the most affordable ways to shore up your digital privacy over the holidays.

While most of us associate Black Friday with snagging bargains on things we've eyed up for a while, cybercriminals and bad actors get just as excited about the increase in online shopping. In fact, NordVPN saw a 23% spike in fake Amazon sites since October – no doubt designed to snare bargain hunters.

Fortunately, Proton VPN is a security-first service and a true advocate for digital privacy. Alongside standard encryption and regular audits of its logging policy, a Proton VPN subscription also comes with access to Secure Core, which routes traffic through hardened entry servers before it reaches its final destination. One of these sites is hosted inside a former military base in Iceland, with similar protections in Switzerland and Sweden.

Proton VPN is built around protections that go beyond basic encryption, with features tailored for high-risk environments and restrictive networks.

A key part of that setup is Secure Core. This feature routes your traffic through a Proton-owned server in a controlled, high-security environment before it leaves through the chosen endpoint – another VPN server.

Proton keeps these entry machines in places with dependable privacy laws, such as Switzerland, Sweden, and Iceland, and the facilities themselves are intentionally hard to reach. For example, Switzerland uses biometric locks, Sweden uses underground hosting, and Iceland relies on a repurposed military site.

This physical security reduces the chance that a server can be tampered with, seized, or quietly monitored. Proton can tightly control its Secure Core facilities, but it can not make the same guarantees about servers located in high-risk regions such as Turkey or the UAE, where infrastructure may be inspected or monitored by local authorities.

Secure Core isn't necessary for everyday use, nor is it meant for every user. However, it's relevant when connecting to regions with aggressive monitoring or content restrictions.

If you're looking for a more lightweight, but still impactful, way to shore up your digital security, it's well worth checking out Surfshark's Alternative ID tool. It spins up an entirely new online persona (complete with name and email address) that you can use in place of your real details. It's included in all Surfshark plans, but we think Surfshark One offers the most value at $2.19 per month (roughly $60 in total).