NeXTGenVPN Review [WORTH IT?]

Welcome back to Top Dog Apps. Guess what……? We have yet another epic VPN review! OK….maybe not an epic review….but at least slightly interesting 🙂 Today we are reviewing a VPN service called NeXTGenVPN. Not only do they have a weirdly capitalized product name, they also run a VPN for those that are interested. Are they any good? Let’s find out together.

What is NeXTGenVPN?

NeXTGenVPN is a VPN service that I believe is based out of the Seychelles. I say I believe as I can’t find anywhere on their website that clearly states where they are based. I had to rely on a page from Tracxn that says they are located in Victoria, Seychelles. Is this accurate….who knows?

NeXTGenVPN don’t have any particularly exciting features to talk about. See for yourself:

• Zero personal data collected
• No logging of activity on the service
• OpenVPN supported and allows support for a range of devices
• 5 simulataneous connections
• Compatible with all browsers (in the world?)
• All servers owned by NeXTGenVPN
• No leakage of valuable DNS
• 0.001% downtime over last 5 years (this is what they claim anyway)

How Much is NeXTGenVPN?

As with pretty much All VPN services these days, their pricing is heavily weighted to longer subscription commitments. For $11.95 you will get one single month of their service, but if you are willing to pay up front for a whole year, this will go down to $6.99 a month. This is still on the high side when you look at the competition.

My current gold standard for VPNs is Pure VPN, and they will ask you to pay $4.16 a month when sign up for a year over there.

What Do I Like About NeXTGenVPN?

Good Refund

It is good to see that NeXTGenVPN offer a full 30 day money back guaruntee. I have seen quite a few bigger VPN outfits that don’t offer something like this. Refunds give us (the customers) trust in the service being offered. If a company is refund shy, this should be a red flag about the trust they have in the quality of their product.

Security and Privacy are a Priority

The theme that runs though NeXTGenVPN is the fact that security and the privacy of their users is of a high priority. Their servers are a good example of this. They openly state that they don’t have as many servers as their competition, but that they do this purposely to ensure the safety and security of their network. They argue that those with many servers don’t own all of them, but will rent quite a few from third parties. NeXTGenVPN see this as a potential security hole.

NeXTGenVPN also state that they route their traffic through several nodes to ensure the true IP address is never revealed to outside parties. They say to expect 20-30% speed loss due to the ‘heavy encryption’ they use.

What Don’t I Like About NeXTGenVPN?

No Logging?

They have a stated policy (on several pages of their site) to never log any information about their users. They confidently state ‘no logging- period.” However, I do not see any direct mention of no logging in their privacy policy. They do state in there that they only have information you have voluntarily given them (like when you might contact them for support), but I still find it weird that a VPN service that seems to pride itself on security and privacy would not state this more clearly in the policies.

Out of Date Design

What is it with me and VPN services recently? The past week or so I feel like every VPN I have reviewed has had a simply god awful design in my opinion. NeXTGenVPN is unfortunately no different.

As someone that creates websites, I can assure you it is not that hard or expensive to get a good-looking site up and running. Yet we still have organisations such as this one that are peddling late 90s or early 2000s web design to the masses.

The website looks like the most basic affair, and is not helped by the use of some truly awful stock images that scream to me ‘stock images’!!

They have a ‘key notes’ section that looks like a powerpoint presentation from the early 90s! Seriously, hire a web designer already 🙂

Location?

The location of a VPN is crucial to anyone that wants any kind of peace of mind about the safety of their online presence on the service. The fact that I can’t find any information about where NeXTGenVPN is based is frankly not acceptable to me.

They want to put a spotlight on their ‘amazing’ security and privacy but yet don’t want to tell us where they are based! Weird!

Along with a privacy policy, details on location are the bread and butter when choosing any VPN product.

I managed to do my own digging on this, but who knows how accurate this is. Information like this should come from the horse’s mouth!

Should You Subscribe to NeXTGenVPN?

Now we get to the simple question….should you subscribe to this VPN service? Is it worth your VPN bucks? Usually, this would be a simple question to answer, but not today.

When I tried to sign up to this service I got the following message.

This was a weird message to see. It seems they want to maintain their service by making sure they have an ‘optimal’ number of users. If their VPN is so good, why not just increase their capacity. I went over reasons in my head as to why they may operate like this, and the only valid reason I could come up with is that they want to remain a small service.

To me, this translates into a lack of ambition. That they are just happy trundling along with a small set of users. To me, this apparent lack of ambition would probably also mean they aren’t actively developing new features, so don’t expect any soon.

Of course this is all speculation and I hope that NeXTGenVPN prove me wrong. But the fact is, the service is closed so I cannot buy a subscription and test their servers. In a world saturated with VPNs, this is no sweat to me and I simply move on.

I currently recommend Pure VPN as my ‘gold standard’ alternative to NeXTGenVPN. They are well established in the VPN world, offer blazingly fast servers and all the main features I like to see. If you want to check them out yourselves, simply click over to the Pure VPN official website. This is who I currently use when I need a VPN anyway.

Going back to NeXTGenVPN, there was another thing I found weird. The copyright on their website only goes up to 2018 at the time of writing, see below….

This points more to a dieing service, rather than one that is selective when it comes to customer acquisition. Either that, or someone has made a schoolboy error in their web design 🙂

When you add it all up, NeXTGenVPN is not a service you should even waste your time thinking about, as you can’t use them even if you wanted to 🙂