Free or Paid China VPN: Why Free Nodes Keep Dropping and What Paid Should Cost

• Crowding: hundreds or thousands share one machine and one cross-border link. Fine by day; at 8–11 pm Beijing time everyone buffers.
• Caps: traffic cap, time cap, speed held below 1080p, and a paywall pops up mid-episode — these are really trials of a paid product without saying so.
• Selling: ads injected, browsing history collected, or your device used as someone else’s exit node. Free “China” browser extensions are the usual offenders.

First, the exit may not be in mainland China. Many free “China” nodes are Hong Kong, Taiwan or Japan addresses: Chinese pages open, but Tencent Video and iQIYI still show the region notice and banks still treat you as abroad. One IP-location lookup after connecting tells you.

Second, IPv6 and DNS are not handled. Free options almost never reject IPv6 inside the tunnel, so with IPv6 on your device the video site still sees an overseas address. This is the most common cause of “connected but still blocked”; see the streaming guide.

Enough: an occasional Chinese page for research or news, no demands on speed or stability, and no logging in to anything.

Pay: series and music, banking or Alipay logins, the family TV and grandparents, ticket sales at a fixed time — these need “works every time”, which free cannot deliver.

A simple test: if a drop would annoy you, it is time to pay.

A RoyalShield standard account is US$7 a month and includes 24 regions, 5 devices online at once, and every connection method — AnyConnect, OpenVPN, sing-box and the web proxy. A premium account costs twice that, with better routes, and is required for the router option.

Two ways to avoid a monthly purchase: claim the 24-hour free trial first (no credit card, once per account) and test it at evening peak; or pay per day — after topping up points, a standard account costs 2 points a day at 25 points for US$7, under 60 cents a day, ideal for a few days before a trip home.

Inviting a friend who registers and makes a first payment adds 30 days to your account, with no limit on friends — a lasting source of free time.

1. Claim the trial, connect to the China route, and check that the IP location is mainland China.
2. Open an IPv6 test page and confirm IPv6 is unavailable or also a mainland address.
3. Play a 1080p episode after 8 pm Beijing time and watch for repeated buffering.
4. Switch to another mainland exit and try again, to rule out luck.
5. Check that it uses standard protocols (AnyConnect, OpenVPN, sing-box): the clients come from the vendor or open source, and the configuration outlives any one provider. A proprietary app leaves nothing once it is pulled from the store.