i just watched the techlore video on vpn and riseup/calyx vpn are very high in the ranking but how can we know if riseup vpn or calyx vpn are reliable if they are free, it seems to me that in general everyone always tells me don’t use free vpn because they only sell your personal data. So I was wondering if riseup vpn is trustworthy even if it’s free and if we can use it without fear.
thank you for the answer!
CalyxVPN is made by The Calyx Institute, a non-profit organization and is one of the respected and reputable organizations in the privacy community. Also known with their Mobile internet hotspot and CalyxOS.
Riseup is a volunteer-run collective based in Seattle.
So how do they make money? Donations and other things they may sell to people like you.
For example, Calyx has their mobile hotspot that you can pay to get 4G/5G everywhere you go. I think it is only for US people though. They also have a membership program to get ‘advantages’ like a Pixel 4a 5G or a Pixel 6a (depending on the plan you choose) pre-loaded with CalyxOS and also an Internet Membership to actually get their Internet Mobile Hotspot, also, depending on the plan you choose you get a 4G or 5G Hotspot.
For Riseup, it’s all donations.
Hope this reply helps 
I’ve used neither, but I did look around and there was some discussion on this forum before about them.
For the most part they seam fine and preform about as expected with other VPNs.
For the case of Riseup, there was a controversy about their warrant canary :
Quoting Wikipedia :
In mid-November 2016, an unexplained stealth error appeared in Riseup’s warrant canary page, and they did not respond to requests to update the canary, leading some to believe the collective was the target of a gag order.[20] On February 16, 2017, the Riseup collective revealed their failure to update the canary was due to two sealed warrants from the FBI, which made it impossible to legally update their canary. The two sealed warrants concerned a public contact of an international distributed denial-of-service attack extortion ring and an account using ransomware to extort people financially. The decision to release user information has been criticized in the hacker community.[21] The canary has since been updated, but no longer states the absence of gag orders.[22]
Here’s another article about that :
It didn’t impacted the VPN directly but their e-mail service but it’s something to keep in mind.
thank you for all this information 