How Much Does a VPN Cost for a Company? (2026)

Quick answer: A company VPN costs $0 for up to 5 people on Twingate Starter, around $510 a year for ten users on Twingate Teams, and around $2,550 a year for fifty if you buy well. Paid seats run roughly $4.25 to $18 per user per month on prices read from vendors on 21 September 2026. Before you sign, check the minimum seat count, any required add on, and the monthly price.

The honest answer to what a company VPN costs is anywhere between nothing and nine thousand dollars a year, and the spread has almost nothing to do with quality. It is driven by three things: how many seats you must buy, whether a required add on sits on top of the seat price, and whether you pay monthly or yearly.

Here is the whole picture in numbers, at 5, 10, 25 and 50 users.

Every price below was read from the vendor’s own pricing page on 21 September 2026.

The short answer

• Free is real below 6 people. Twingate Starter covers 5 users, Tailscale Personal covers 6.
• The cheapest paid seat: Twingate Teams at $5 per user per month, less 15% on yearly billing.
• The dearest surprise: NordLayer Core and Premium list a server with dedicated IP at plus $40 a month. At 5 users that add on is 42% of the bill.
• Cheapest of all, if you have the skills: self hosted WireGuard on a $6 a month droplet. Seventy two dollars a year at any headcount.
• The trap: annual billing saves 15% to 22%, and locks you into seats you have not hired yet.

Per user prices, as published

Sources: NordLayer pricing, Twingate pricing, Tailscale pricing, OpenVPN pricing. All read 21 September 2026.

What it costs at 5, 10, 25 and 50 users

Annual totals, in US dollars, on the cheapest billing option each vendor publishes.

Droplet price from DigitalOcean droplet pricing, read 21 September 2026: $4 a month for 512 MiB, $6 for 1 GiB, $12 for 2 GiB.

The spread at 50 users is the thing to sit with. $2,550 against $10,800 for the same headcount. That is not a quality gap, it is a packaging gap, and most of it is decided before you compare a single feature.

The three hidden costs

1. The minimum seat count

NordLayer’s own pricing page states a minimum of 5 users on Lite, Core and Premium. If you are a team of three, you pay for five. On Lite that is $480 a year for three people, an effective $13.33 per person per month instead of $8.

Twingate and Tailscale publish no such minimum, and both have a free tier that covers a team of that size outright.

2. The add on that is not optional

NordLayer’s pricing page lists Server with Dedicated IP, plus $40 a month, required against the Core and Premium plans. That is $480 a year regardless of headcount.

Here is what it does to the per person cost:

The advertised price is $11 per user per month. A five person company actually pays $19. The gap closes as you grow, which is exactly backwards from what a small business needs.

The dedicated IP is not a rip off, to be clear. It is what gives you a fixed address to allowlist on a bank portal, a client’s system or your own server, and it is the single most common reason a business needs a VPN rather than a personal one. But it should be in the headline price, and it is not.

3. Per connection, not per person

OpenVPN Access Server is priced at $7 per connection per month, and its pricing page describes those as simultaneous connections rather than named users. One person with a laptop and a phone connected at the same time consumes two.

That makes the $7 figure look cheaper than it is for any team where people carry more than one device. Count devices in use, not headcount, and the effective price for a ten person office can be closer to $14 per person.

The annual versus monthly trap

Every vendor here rewards annual billing.

• Twingate shows yearly at 15% off, taking Teams from $5 to $4.25 and Business from $10 to $8.50.
• NordLayer advertises annual savings of up to 22%, and its published $8, $11 and $14 prices are the annual ones.
• Tailscale showed the same $8 and $18 rates for monthly and annual when we checked, so there is nothing to gain by committing.

The discount is real. So is the cost of it. Annual billing on a per seat product means:

1. You buy seats before you hire. Most vendors let you add seats mid term and very few let you remove them.
2. You cannot leave when the product disappoints. The eleven months you have prepaid are the reason people stay on tools they have stopped liking.
3. The saving is smaller than it sounds at small headcounts. Fifteen percent of a ten person Twingate Teams plan is $90 a year. That is not worth a twelve month lock if you are still deciding.

Our rule: pay monthly for the first three months of any business VPN, then switch to annual once it has survived contact with your actual team. The extra cost of that trial is $90 at ten seats on Twingate, and it buys you the right to change your mind.

What about a consumer VPN for the office?

It is cheaper, and for most companies it is the wrong tool.

Surfshark’s Starter plan is $2.49 a month on the 24 month term, billed $67.23 for 27 months, from its pricing page on 21 September 2026. That is a fraction of any business plan.

What you do not get, at any consumer price:

• A fixed IP address you can allowlist on a client system or a bank.
• Central user management. When someone leaves on a Friday, you need their access gone by Friday evening, not a shared password that has to be changed for everyone.
• Access control per resource. A business VPN lets finance reach the accounting server and nobody else.
• An audit trail of who connected to what.

If all you want is encrypted public Wi Fi for a handful of laptops, a consumer plan genuinely does the job, and the cheapest safe VPN covers the ones we trust. Check Surfshark If you need any of the four things above, you need a business product. We set out where that line falls in do you need a VPN for business, and the shortlist itself is in the best VPN for small business. If you are only choosing between the two big consumer names, NordVPN vs Surfshark is the shorter read.

The self hosted option, priced honestly

WireGuard on your own server is the cheapest line in every table above: $72 a year on a $6 a month droplet, at 5 users or 50.

The costs that table does not show are yours. Someone has to patch the server, rotate keys when a laptop is lost, and be reachable when the tunnel drops on a Sunday. If that person is already on your payroll and enjoys this sort of thing, self hosting is excellent value and the same skill set covers running a VPS instead of shared hosting. If it is not, the $510 a year you would spend on Twingate Teams at ten seats is cheap insurance against a single point of failure who is on holiday.

What we could not verify, and why it is missing

• Check Point Harmony SASE, formerly Perimeter 81. Its product page publishes no per user price. The only route to a number is a sales contact or demo request, so there is no row for it here.
• Proton VPN for Business. Its pricing page rendered placeholder values rather than figures when we fetched it, so we left it out rather than guess.

A vendor that will not publish a price is telling you something. It usually means the price depends on how large you are, and that discovering it costs you a call.

What we would actually buy

• Under 6 people: Twingate Starter or Tailscale Personal. Free, and not crippled.
• 6 to 25 people, no fixed IP needed: Twingate Teams, about $510 a year at ten seats.
• Any size, fixed IP needed: NordLayer Core with the dedicated IP server. $1,800 a year at ten seats, and budget for the $480 server from day one.
• Technical team, tight budget: WireGuard on a $6 droplet, with a named owner.

Whichever you pick, the VPN is one control among several. The rest of the list is in how to secure customer data in a small business, and it is shorter and cheaper than most people expect.

Bottom line

A company VPN costs $0 for five people, around $510 a year for ten, and around $2,550 a year for fifty if you buy well. It costs four times that if you buy the wrong package.

Before you sign anything, check three numbers that are never in the headline: the minimum seat count, the price of any add on marked required, and what the plan costs when you pay monthly. Those three explain almost the entire spread.

Sources

• NordLayer: business VPN pricing
• Twingate: pricing
• Tailscale: pricing
• OpenVPN: Access Server pricing
• DigitalOcean: Droplet pricing
• Surfshark: VPN pricing
• Check Point: Harmony SASE product page

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