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Open the plan page and pick the term that suits you. Every plan carries the same 45-day money-back guarantee.
Go further on the network trusted by 3.4 million travellers
45-day money-back guarantee
Take Cairnway for a run with nothing riding on it. If it isn't right for you inside the first 45 days, we send your money back — the whole amount, no interview required.
A VPN, short for virtual private network, is a sealed tunnel that runs between the device in your hand and the rest of the internet. It keeps snooping, throttling, and blocking off your back.
The moment you connect to one of our servers, your traffic slips inside an encrypted channel that nobody on the outside can read into — not a hostel router, not a regulator, not the company that sells you broadband.
Try Cairnway Risk-FreeOpen the plan page and pick the term that suits you. Every plan carries the same 45-day money-back guarantee.
You'll be handed the app for whatever you're on right away. Getting it onto your other devices takes about a minute each.
Tap the big button and you're on the fastest server we can find. Or choose any city you like from the whole network.
Show up anywhere on the map with a fleet of servers that spans six continents.
Everything you send is wrapped in AES-256, the cipher security teams still trust.
Actual people answer, day or night, whether it's a setup snag or a slow evening.
Our servers run entirely in volatile memory, so nothing is ever written to a disk.
Streams stay sharp and calls stay steady, wherever on the network you land.
One subscription protects the whole household — connect ten of them at the same time.
We keep nothing that could connect you to a site, a session, or a search.
Named Best Privacy App by The Ledger, Wirefield, and Northbeat.
I'm on a plane most weeks and this is the one app I never have to think about.
Whatever site I land on has no idea where I am or who I am, and that suits me.
A VPN swaps out your IP address — the number that says who you are and roughly where you sit in the world. A different one makes both much harder to pin down. With Cairnway you can appear to be in Lisbon, Osaka, Toronto, Melbourne, or any of 112 countries.
Changing your IP address helps put distance between you and the trackers baked into sites, apps, and ad networks. It also stops your broadband company, your mobile carrier, and anyone sharing the café Wi-Fi from reading what you're doing, thanks to a layer of real encryption.
A VPN closes off a whole class of attacks: packet sniffing, look-alike hotspots, and anyone quietly sitting between you and the site you asked for. Travellers, remote teams, and anyone who works from a table by the window use one every time they're on a network they don't own.
If privacy matters to you at all, the honest answer is every time you connect. The app sits in the background and stays out of the way while you get on with everything else — which is rather the point.
That said, here are the moments where you'll feel the difference:
Being somewhere else shouldn't change how the internet behaves. Keep your home setup however far you go.
Watch and listen to what you like without a provider deciding your evening is a good place to save bandwidth.
Joining an open hotspot in a café, a terminal, or a park leaves a lot on show. Encryption closes that window.
Reach servers, maps, and add-ons your network would rather block. It also absorbs junk traffic and takes the edge off your ping.
Peer transfers hand your IP address to strangers by design. A VPN keeps it out of the swarm so the download stays your business.
Prices shift by country more often than you'd think. With a VPN you can shop from wherever the deal is.
To follow what a VPN does, it helps to look first at what your connection does without one.
Open a website and you reach it through your internet service provider. That provider hands you a unique IP address that the site can use to recognise you. And because the provider is routing every request, it can see which sites you visit — all of it tied back to that one address.
Connect through a VPN and the app on your device (the client) opens a protected link to a VPN server. Your traffic still crosses your provider's network, but they can no longer read it or tell where it's headed. The sites you open see only the server's IP address — one shared by many people and rotated often.
A handful of ideas do most of the work. Here's each one, briefly:
The VPN server stands in for you. Rather than your real address and city, the sites you visit see the server's address and the server's city — nothing more.
The practical effect is that you become much harder to single out.
Setting up a trustworthy link with a machine you've never met is a hard problem, and it's solved with mathematics rather than optimism.
Once the handshake is done, client and server both know they're talking to each other and to nobody in between.
The connection is then protected in two ways: tunnelling and encryption.
Tunnelling wraps every packet inside another packet, which makes it far harder for anything along the route to make sense of what's passing.
The contents of that tunnel are scrambled so that only the intended recipient can unscramble them. Your traffic stays yours — your provider included.
Protocols are the methods your device uses to reach the server. Some favour speed, some favour security, and some simply cope better with a bad connection.
Most services pick from the same shelf of protocols. We built Driftline to beat them on speed, stability, and security at once — try it and see whether we managed it. Read the Driftline notes.
Cairnway picks the best protocol for the network you're on, though you're welcome to choose one yourself.
The protocols in common use today are:
*Not supported by Cairnway.
A consumer VPN — sometimes called a personal VPN — is a service sold straight to individuals, usually on a subscription.
Cairnway is one of these: it exists to serve the privacy of the person paying for it.
A company VPN, also called a business VPN, lets remote staff reach internal systems as though they were sitting in the office.
Unlike a consumer service, it exists to protect the organisation — not necessarily the individual using it.
Some tinkerers and IT folks prefer to stand up their own VPN on hardware they control.
What that setup can't give you is a shared pool of IP addresses, servers in dozens of countries, or most of the features consumer services include.
A VPN isn't the only tool that can improve your privacy, your security, or your freedom to read what you like.
Onion routing networks are free, volunteer-run relays that bounce your traffic through several random hops so the starting point gets lost along the way.
They can raise your anonymity a long way, and running one alongside a VPN is about the strongest setup available to a private individual.
The catch is speed. Every extra hop costs you, so downloading or sharing large files through one is a test of patience.
A proxy is any middleman between your device and the internet. Unlike a VPN, though, most of the "proxy services" you'll come across are slow and offer nothing much in the way of privacy or security.
Free ones deserve particular suspicion: if you aren't paying, many will find another way to make money from your data, usually by selling it on.
Neither onion routing nor a proxy replaces what a VPN gives you. For most people, a service you can actually hold to account is still the right privacy tool.
The quality that matters most is trust. A VPN worth paying for:
After that, pick on the features you'll use: where the servers are, whether it covers every device you own, and whether the bandwidth is genuinely uncapped.
Running a fast, well-audited network of servers costs real money. A free service has to recover that somewhere, and it is usually from the data of the people using it.
In the large majority of countries, yes — they're ordinary business software. A handful of places restrict them, so it's worth a quick check before you travel.
You should. Phones hop between networks all day — home, office, café, airport — which is exactly the pattern a VPN is built for.
Encryption always costs something, but on a well-provisioned network the difference is small enough that most people never notice it. Occasionally a VPN is faster, because it sidesteps throttling.
Slightly, in the same way any background connection does. On a modern handset the effect is measured in a few percent over a full day.
A VPN removes one of the strongest signals — your IP address. It does not sign you out of accounts or clear cookies, so pair it with sensible browser habits.
Yes, and it's a good idea on any network you don't control. Some banks flag a sudden change of country, so it can help to connect through a server near home.
That's how we run it ourselves. Leaving it connected means you're never relying on remembering to switch it on at the moment it matters most.
Real support from real people. We're on instant chat and email whenever you need a hand getting set up or working out what changed.
Contact SupportThe app is simple, and so is the promise behind it. If it isn't for you, we refund what you paid. No hoops, no risk.
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