Alright, Let's Talk About Unlimited Pro

There has been a lot of discussion recently regarding accounts getting banned or disabled and questions about what Unlimited Pro actually means so I will address these topics and concerns here.

TL;DR

• No service that offers unlimited is actually unlimited. Other VPNs also say Unlimited and still impose limits or restrictions.
• Our policy is “Unlimited for reasonable personal use”. We've had this policy for 9 years, we've just never really enforced it, now we are.
• Personal use means only you use it on your own personal devices.
• Reasonable use means you’re within the range of data usage that 99.999% of people fall into.
• Torrent seeding is not personal use.
• Device limits are enforced for parallel connections and logged in sessions, and only when those counts can’t possibly be personal usage.
• We won’t give an explicit limit for data usage as the anti-abuse system monitors multiple factors. 
• Lifetime Pro users are not being targeted in some conspiracy. Lifetime Pro users are just part of the same anti-abuse monitoring system as every other Windscribe account.
• You might get one of three email notices. One is just a notice of session counts, one is an account warning+disable, and one is an account ban after being warned.
• We are improving multiple facets of our anti-abuse system and the communication relating to actions taken on accounts.

What is Unlimited? 

The word "unlimited" means...without limits. However, in the real world, nothing can be offered as unlimited as that is physically impossible. And yet things are still offered as unlimited. An all-you-can-eat buffet doesn't mean infinite food, you get a time limit. Phone plan providers will offer unlimited data but it gets throttled to low speeds after a threshold is reached. And yes, many other VPNs also offer unlimited VPN data. We've seen a lot of comments criticizing us for using the term "Unlimited" when just about every VPN also uses “Unlimited”, and just like anything else that is labeled as unlimited, almost all those other VPNs are in fact limited in one way or another.

So How Does Windscribe Differ? 

Sadly we haven't discovered an infinite data glitch. For 9 years we've had pretty much the same unlimited use policy - unlimited for reasonable personal use - and for most of those 9 years we have barely ever enforced this policy. That's how people have gotten away with using over 8 PB per month. Yes you read that right, 8 PETAbytes per month, 8000 TB. In a month. On one account.

Now, 8 PB is a bit of an outlier, but we’ve been seeing the number of people using an enormous amount of data steadily increasing. And coinciding with that, we’ve been seeing a lot more complaints from regular users saying that certain locations perform like crap because...you guessed it, those locations were being abused by a handful of people. So in order to maintain the integrity of our service for our users, we've started to actually enforce our usage policy.

This enforcement has already had a significant impact for many customers who have told us they see a substantial improvement in speeds and performance. As an example, here is a server that many people were unable to use because it was way too slow:

See how that graph is peaking at 400Mb/s for a while? That's because a small handful of accounts on one ScribeForce team were consistently hogging basically the entire bandwidth of that server. Once those accounts were disabled, it drops by 90% and regular people could actually start using the server again.

Now you try! Can you spot where the abuse starts and ends?

During the period of time that the abuse was happening, if you were to connect to this server, you would get poor VPN performance. This then causes public complaints, support tickets and bad reviews saying our service is slow. All because of a few bad apples.

“Unlimited for Reasonable Personal Use”

Let's dissect what this actually means a little bit.

Personal Use

This is fairly straight forward. The VPN is meant to be used by you for your own personal use on all your personal devices. Here are some examples that aren't personal use:

• Sharing your account with other people
• Selling your account to other people
• Running the VPN in a datacenter environment where you host some service for others
• Using the VPN to script/bot/abuse other services
• Using the VPN for mass torrent seeding - seeding is just hosting files for other people from your own hardware. This isn't personal use. More on this below.

Reasonable Use

This is more subjective as people's usage differs, but we can still make some assumptions about typical internet usage. 

Most people don't actually use that much data on the internet. All the text and image-based webpages you load in a month are basically negligible. Scrolling feeds is a bit more, depending on how much you scroll, but even 24/7 scrolling is peanuts. Video content like YouTube, Netflix, etc is when the usage really starts counting and big downloads like triple A games are probably the most data heavy.

We've accounted for all of this and much more.

You can watch 8 hours of 4K 60fps YouTube every single day and not hit any limits.

You can download the entire GTA V game on Steam every day and not get flagged.

You can watch 8 hours of 4K 60fps YouTube AND download the entire GTA V game on Steam every day and still be fine.

You can open Netflix on 2 TVs, one for each eye, and stream it 24/7 on both for the whole month and run into zero problems with our limits. 

So why are people getting warnings and bans? Because their usage goes beyond any of that into unreasonable territory. Amounts of data that start to not make sense for a single user, ranging all the way up to amounts that are simply unexplainable as anything else but abuse or account sharing. 

Allow me to put this into perspective with some examples of unreasonable usage in a monthly span:

• Downloading your entire 2000 game Steam library
• Downloading 3000 movies
• Streaming 5000 hours of Netflix
• Downloading 3,000,000 books

And even IF you do any of this, even if you do ALL of this in one month, you will get a warning to let you know that whatever you're doing goes beyond our reasonable personal use policy and that you should dial it back. If you keep doing it, then your account can get banned. And only if it's absolutely egregious usage that is obviously abuse or account sharing will the account be considered for a ban without warning.

Torrent Seeding is Not Personal Use

Most people who have many TBs of usage per month are seeding torrents. Some other VPNs will just outright ban you for torrenting/seeding since they are the ones who get the DMCA claims. Some VPNs prevent mass torrent seeding by not having port forwarding which most seedboxes use. We ourselves have had to remove locations from our VPN because the server provider got tired of forwarding DMCA claims to us. Server providers can be and have been taken to court for ignoring the matter.

Now, we don't track what you do so we don't know if you're scrolling on Instagram or seeding the latest Marvel movie. What we do know is how much data your account is using. Downloading a media file for consumption is singular and has a limit. A 10GB movie download takes 10GB of data transfer. Seeding that movie has no limit, and that can eat up a LOT of data.

Seeding is also just file hosting. You are offering the files on your hard drive for others to download. Nuances of P2P aside, if you have a 10GB movie and you seed it for 1TB, you've shared that movie with 100 people. This is not a personal use case, this is a service.

Device Limits

Our reasonable use policy also applies to the number of devices connected simultaneously and number of logged in sessions. Maybe you barely use any data each month, but you still get a warning. Well how many devices do you have connected to the VPN? Once again, we’ve accounted for reasonable use and more. Nobody has 50 personal devices that all need a VPN connected at the same time, that is clearly some sort of click farm or account sharing. We also monitor logged in app sessions - if we detect hundreds of sign-ins on your account in a month, clearly something strange is going on - you are sharing your account, or your account is compromised because you used 123456789 as your password.

“Just give us a number”

A lot of people keep saying we should just publicly give a number for how much data usage they are allowed. We aren’t going to do this. The reason is that the anti-abuse system is not just monitoring VPN data use, there are multiple factors that are being looked at. 100 parallel connections using 1GB per month in total to abuse the shit out of some mobile game with a click farm, that's abuse. 1 connection using 100+ TB per month is abuse. If an account gains thousands of logged in sessions in a month, that’s kind of hard to explain away as not being abuse (or account compromise).  

"I didn't do nothing"

Much like any public service with a login form, Windscribe is heavily abused by people who have a lot of time on their hands. These "kind" folks, armed with access to tens/hundreds of thousands of residential IPs, constantly brute force accounts. On an average day, there are over 50 million fraudulent login attempts. Due to insecure passwords (123456789, qwerty123, asdfghjkl, etc) a sizable amount of accounts is successfully logged into. Each one of these logins will count against your account. So while you may think you're the only one using your account because you didn't share it, and use it infrequently, a bunch of dudes in Russia may be using it too. Solution? Set a strong password you didn't use anywhere else, and enable 2FA.

How This Affects Lifetime Users

It doesn’t. Unless the account is abusing the service. There's no special monitoring of Lifetime Pro accounts. The only difference between a Lifetime Pro and a non-Lifetime Pro user is the plan ID on the account. In every other sense they are identical.

The only reason this is brought up by people is because Lifetime Pro accounts are caught up in the same anti-abuse system as all other accounts. There is no conspiracy to prune Lifetime Pro accounts. 

However, they are highly sought-after by hackers and when they eventually crack into a Lifetime Pro account with password 1234567890, they sell it to a hundred people in some Iranian Telegram group and the account obviously gets flagged and disabled. We do our best to work with the actual owner to restore their sole access but we've seen this play out hundreds of times. So what's the lesson? Secure your damn account! We have 2FA for you and good password managers are free.

Clarifying the Email Notices You Get

We’ve seen some confusion regarding the emails you might receive from Windscribe regarding your account. We are working on improving these so they are more clear, but I’d like to explain what each one means. Bear in mind that these explanations are in the context of anti-abuse, the emails can also sometimes be sent in other contexts involving account security, payment fraud, referral fraud, etc.

Urgent: Suspicious account activity

This is an email you will receive if your account has a high number of logged in sessions or unusual amount of connections. No action is taken on your account from our end if this email is sent out, it will continue to work as usual. It’s just meant to notify you of the high session count and suggests that you change your password which will clear your session counts in case the account was compromised.
While it can indicate that the account was hacked, it can also just mean there’s a lot of old stale sessions that have never been cleared out. We are improving this to be more accurate so you don’t receive this because of stale sessions and it’s more indicative of a compromised account or account sharing.

Your account has been temporarily disabled

This email can be sent out for a few reasons:

1. Because the previously mentioned account session count got WAY too high
2. The automated anti-abuse system was triggered due to a combination of data usage and/or parallel connections.
3. A human reviewed the account and manually disabled it due to usage patterns.

In the first case, the email serves to protect your account as it’s highly indicative of a hacked account. In the second 2 cases, this email serves as your warning that whatever you’re doing has been deemed as going beyond our reasonable personal use policy. We understand the confusion between these and are working on changing it so it’s more clear which of the two you’re being notified of.

When you get this email, your account is locked until you reset your password using the "Forgot Password" form. This clears existing session counts and unlocks the account.

Your account has been banned

This one speaks for itself. You would get this if your account has been permanently banned. It means we’ve disabled your account and warned you about its actions, and after the account has been unlocked again, the same usage as before continued. In very rare cases, you might get this email without receiving the previous one. This would be due to egregious abuse. The threshold to trigger a ban without a warning is extremely high and cannot be explained by any reasonable personal use cases.

For Accounts Without an Email Address

You might wonder what happens if you don’t have an email address on your account. The actions are still taken on the account, you just don’t receive emails about them.

If an action was taken, you will be logged out of the apps and website. When you attempt to log into the website or apps, you will get a notice on screen about the state of your account. The account will either be locked or banned. These correspond with the Temporarily Disabled and Banned emails above.

While we don’t require one, we recommend you have an email on your account for communications like this. Your emails are never shared with any third parties and cannot expose any VPN activity on your account because we don’t log what you do while you’re connected.

What We Did Wrong and What We’re Doing to Improve

We started enforcing the policies a few weeks ago and admittedly, we took some wrong steps. Our anti-abuse system also has a few issues that we have been working on improving and we appreciate your patience as we work out the kinks.

We’ve been listening to user feedback, had multiple internal discussions about this and have been adjusting our systems and protocols accordingly. Here’s a rundown of what will be changing.

1. Our messaging to users when actions are taken has been sub-par. We’ve had internal discussions about this and it will be improved. 
2. The metric that counts monthly data usage was set at a pretty high number before. It is now set even higher.
3. We’ve significantly increased the threshold for no-warning bans. 99.999% of people, even high usage customers, wouldn’t get instantly banned.
4. Part of our anti-abuse system is session counting. We’ve significantly relaxed some triggers pertaining to session counts since it was causing more confusion than anything.
5. We are improving the email notices people get when they are alerted to information or actions regarding their account. 
6. The Terms of Use have been updated on April 16th, 2025 to include the following prohibited uses:
   "...engaging in usage that excessively consumes shared system resources to the detriment of other users, consuming shared system resources for non-personal reasons such as commercial activities, automated processes, or excessive data transfers not consistent with typical individual use..."

There has been a lot of frustration and confusion recently regarding our actions. We are reading all of the feedback and having active discussions both internally and with users for how to adjust. We want to thank the community for letting their voices be heard regarding this matter. Not every company is fortunate enough to have such a passionate group of users and for that we are thankful. While it’s a common corporate platitude, your feedback IS important to us and we are making changes directly because of it. 

We aim to offer the best possible service to all users and you guys let us know when we make changes that are detrimental to that goal. We can’t accommodate everything, but we are certainly doing our best. 

Thanks,

The Windscribe Team