It is 1.85 dollars a month if one pays for 3 years. I am looking into ways of saving money so I was thinking into switching. However, I am a bit worried since 3 years ago I did the same with Nord VPN and it is sooo buggy. It rarely ever works for me. I had to switch to ProtonVPN after paying for 3 years for Nord 💀.
Depends on the provider, but probably they would be analyzing the traffic of the free users the very most to profit off of them. Maybe they're trying to convert them to paying users, maybe they're selling the data, and it could be tricky to figure out which.
The "free" servers aren't free, they have some specific reason why it's profitable for them to run servers where users aren't paying with money. They're capitalists.
And what would prevent paid VPNs from selling data to have even bigger profits? Its all a gamble, be it free VPN or not.
In the end of the day I just want to pay less
It's a gamble if you haven't done research into which VPN providers are trustworthy. r/VPN has a decent comparison table (maybe there's a good community on the fediverse? I haven't checked). You can find discounts for VPN providers from that table that seem trustworthy to you at r/vpncoupons (not aware of a fediverse replacement for that either).
The privacy-friendly VPN providers have one thing in common: they're all paid, afaik.
Thanks for the link 👍
But I am a little concerned that the most popular VPNs rank the highest
True, any table like that could certainly be biased. There's other comparisons out there, like the one on Wikipedia. Tables like that are only a starting point, ofc, it's up to you to decide who you trust.