Reindeer VPN review

At first glance, Reindeer VPN appears a good proposition, with a nice interface, 30+ servers in 7 locations, and even a handy split-tunneling option for apps and domains. However, dig more under the surface and you’ll find that it’s far from ideal. It’s extremely basic, its website (including the supposed privacy policy page) doesn’t even open most of the time, and when it does, you’ll notice it doesn’t even have the HTTPS certificate. Also, you won’t learn much from it and we had to draw information out of its creator via email. 

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Price

While the Reindeer VPN app seems to be free to download and use, checking out the Google Play page will inform you that this “free use” is limited to only 10 minutes over every 4 hours. If this isn’t good enough for you, you can switch to one of the three paid subscription options, each with a 7-day money-back guarantee (although we aren’t told if there are any special conditions). The 3-month subscription will cost you $14 (that’s $4.67/month), 1-year $29 ($2.42/month), and the 2-year subscription $45 ($1.86/month), which is rather inexpensive in the VPN industry.

Alternatives

Reindeer VPN is rather limited, so a more demanding VPN user should look into other options. 

Luckily, the VPN market is filled with superior solutions, including ExpressVPN and NordVPN. These two VPN heavyweights provide absolutely everything a VPN enthusiast might ever require, such as access to all the popular streaming channels, torrenting support, tons of features, military-grade privacy protection, total transparency, and more. 

However, they aren’t the cheapest on the market, so if your budget is limited, Surfshark might be just the thing, as it offers its comprehensive and powerful platform at only $1.99 per month. 

Want a VPN for free? Then Hotspot Shield’s free tier is the one for you with its 500MB of daily data allowance. This should be quite enough to get you perfect online anonymity and access to geo-blocked websites.

Streaming

Reindeer VPN has too many issues and limitations to be a good solution for streaming of popular channels like Netflix and BBC iPlayer, but it will probably get you through YouTube’s geographical blocks. We tried to get more details from the customer support, but to no avail so far.

About the company

Carrying out a manual search for the app also delivered the website http://xunluvpn.asia/, with the same problem of non-existing security certificate but which could open more easily. 

The developer’s location, provided on the Google Play page and the second website, is “Sunset boulevard [sic], San Francisco”. The creator told us via email that there are 30+ servers in 7 locations (there was no other way to find this out), but most of them are reserved for premium users.

Reindeer VPN’s Google Play page lists as publisher “Tetrastar technology CO,. LTD”, that only has one more app in the Google Play store. Clicking on the developer link will lead you to a very basic website - http://xunluvpn.org/ that doesn’t even have a security certificate, which is a huge warning sign. That is, you’ll notice this if you manage to open the website in the first place, which we had changing luck with. 

Privacy and encryption

The “About” section inside the app informed us which app version we were using, listing the features (it’s a very short list, as you can imagine), and providing a link to Terms and Conditions of Use (which only opened a few times in the beginning, timing out regularly afterwards). 

The features listed here, as well as on the “website” and Google Play page include: no registration, no settings required; no speed or bandwidth limitation, VPN servers in multiple countries, fastest route selection with the One Tap Speed Test, as well as “automatically bypass Chinese website” (which we guess means it can help you access Chinese websites or censored websites if you’re in China). 

The app is rather meagre with its features, options, and extras, as well. The only feature worth mentioning is the split-tunnelling option that allows you to choose which apps and domains you feel comfortable enough to bypass the VPN protection. The option for apps is called “Per-App Proxy”, while the option for domains is called “Your Rules”.

Upon contacting email support, we were told that paying for a subscription would provide “PPTP and L2TP account for using on other devices such as PC with three simultaneous connections”.

When we click on the “Privacy Policy” link on the Google Play page, we’re redirected to a broken page or a GoDaddy ‘parked domain’ page, which is yet another huge red flag. Therefore, we have no idea what kind of information is being collected by the provider - personal data, device information, activity logs… and whether this information is given or sold to third-parties like governments, ISPs, and other organisations.

Support

At first, it looks like Reindeer VPN is only available on Android devices, meaning no PC Mac, iOS, or any other support. 

Heading over to Reindeer VPN’s website will provide you with only the most basic information and download links for the latest version of the Android app, as well as the previous version. However, upon contacting the app’s creator (and waiting several hours for a response), we were told that paying for the service will get you “PPTP and L2TP account for using on other devices such as PC with three simultaneous connections” (the help section hasn’t been updated yet and still says only two simultaneous connections are supported).

We were hoping to find more information in the app itself, especially since it has a help section. However, it didn’t tell us much and only worked for the duration of our 10-minute free tier Otherwise, it was completely empty, save for the “Support” link at the bottom which redirects to your device’s email app, adding the email address “[email protected]” as the recipient of a new email message. Apart from the scanty website and Google Play page, the provider has no other online presence. This means no Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube channels. 

Reindeer VPN has over 100,000 installs on Google Play, and has received an average rating of 3.8 by 7,350 users. The app was last updated on May 26, 2020.

Speed and experience

Downloading and using the Reindeer VPN app is very simple. It doesn’t require your registration or any private information. Just go to its Google Play page, download, install, and open it, approve access to your network connections and location, and you’re good to go. Should you decide to pay for the service, you can do so directly from the app.

Reindeer VPN supports only three simultaneous connections under one account, but connects to a chosen server rather quickly. After a dozen or so successful connections, it started to disconnect or even fail to connect without any explanation. We realized this must’ve been because our free 10 minutes per 4 hours were up (no information about this was available in the app). After a few days, we started receiving the message after the trial was up, telling us to wait another 4 hours to try again.

In all fairness, there was a timer inside the app, but it seemed to be off. It started counting down from 31 minutes as soon as we opened the app (before even connecting). The timer continued to run after we connected, randomly resetting to 31 minute again when we unlocked the phone’s screen. We would close the app with the VPN connection still on, reopen it and the timer would jump to 16 minutes left. Locking and unlocking the phone screen seemed to add 3 minutes to it. The app stopped connecting with 17 minutes still left on the timer.

It would’ve been nice to provide clear details inside the app about these conditions or simply devise a simpler system. There should also be some sort of an ‘upgrade’ message when your free time is up.

When connected, its speeds were rather below-average - up to 5bps for its Singapore server (on our 50Mbps test connection). All the speeds are listed next to the server location name in the app, so there’s at least some transparency in this area.

Verdict

The biggest thing that put us off about this VPN is the lack of access to its privacy policy. 

The speeds are unimpressive, customer support lacking, and the free version doesn’t give you much chance to see the app’s advantages, which don’t seem numerous in the first place. It’s a shame as the interface looks good, there’s a useful split-tunneling tool, and it had us connected fairly quickly. 

All things considered, Reindeer VPN is an okay app if you're not very concerned about privacy. If you are, then better look elsewhere, such as ExpressVPN.