Anonsafe has a personal relationship with the founders of Blackout VPN. We are not paid, compensated, or affiliated in any commercial sense. No revenue flows between the two projects.

We mention this upfront because trust is the only thing a privacy site has to offer. You should weigh the recommendation knowing the context, and check the claims in this page against Blackout's own public documentation at blackoutvpn.au.

Most VPN providers ask you to create an account tied to an email address, accept payment in ways that link back to your identity, and ask you to trust a no-logs policy built on top of an identity-rich system. The problem with that approach is structural, if the data exists, it can be subpoenaed, breached, or quietly retained longer than the policy states.

Blackout and Mullvad are the two VPN providers Anonsafe recommends, and the reason is the same for both, they approach the problem at the collection layer, not the retention layer. Rather than asking you to trust that they delete your data, they build systems that have little to collect in the first place.

Blackout does not require an account. Your access credential is a WireGuard private key, validated on their servers via a one-way cryptographic hash. No link exists between that hash and any identity. Payment and key delivery are kept structurally separate. DNS queries are forced through the encrypted tunnel and are not logged.

This is meaningfully different from a VPN provider that has your email address, your payment card, your subscription history, and a privacy policy promising they pinky-swear not to look at it.

• Hiding your browsing destinations from your internet provider, the ISP sees an encrypted connection to a Blackout server, not where you are going
• Hiding your IP address from websites you visit, they see a Blackout server address instead of yours
• Reducing what your ISP can see on untrusted or public Wi-Fi networks
• Using anonymous payment options including Monero and cash by mail if payment privacy matters to you
• Bypassing content blocks imposed by an ISP or country, where VPN use is not restricted
• Routing DNS queries through the encrypted tunnel so DNS lookups do not leak to your ISP's resolver

Blackout's Iceland server is worth noting for people with stronger jurisdictional concerns. Iceland is outside the Five Eyes intelligence alliance and has no mandatory data retention laws for VPN providers.

It does not make you anonymous. It reduces your IP-level exposure and shifts trust from your ISP to Blackout. That is a real improvement for most people, but it is not anonymity.

It does not protect the content of what you send. Websites still receive everything you submit to them, logins, form data, what pages you load. Blackout sees encrypted traffic; the destination site sees your plaintext requests.

It does not protect against login-based tracking. If you are signed in to an account, that account knows who you are regardless of IP address.

It does not protect against browser fingerprinting or cookies. These tracking methods work independently of your IP address.

It does not replace a full threat model. A VPN is one layer. If your concern is targeted surveillance, metadata analysis, or nation-state adversaries, a VPN alone is not enough.

Blackout is priced at AUD $30 for three months, $100 for a year, or $200 for two years (which includes five bonus months, giving 29 months total). There is no monthly plan. Payment is up-front.

Anonymous payments are available but require some steps. Monero is the most private option and is handled directly. Cash by mail is accepted (PO Box 5044, Pacific Pines QLD 4211). Crypto via NOWPayments covers over 300 currencies with no identity requirement.

Each plan provides up to five WireGuard private keys, with two issued by default and three more available on request. Each key can only be in use on one device at a time.

VPN traffic routes through Blackout's servers, adding some latency. Connecting to a nearby server keeps this manageable for most use.

Some services, particularly banking apps and streaming platforms, block VPN exit nodes. This affects most VPN providers, not just Blackout.

Blackout is Australia-based. Australia is part of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, which is a relevant consideration for high-risk situations. The Iceland server option exists partly to address this. The service's structural approach of keeping nothing linkable limits what compelled disclosure could actually produce.

One thing worth noting about Blackout is that they explicitly recommend self-hosting a WireGuard server if you have the technical capability and the finances to manage it. This is an unusual position for a commercial VPN provider to take publicly.

Self-hosting means running your own WireGuard server on a VPS you control. You become your own VPN provider. The tradeoffs are different, you have more control, no third party holds even the minimal data Blackout holds, but the infrastructure responsibility is yours, and your IP address is your own server's IP rather than a shared pool.

If self-hosting is beyond your current capability or budget, using Blackout or Mullvad is a reasonable step that is better than using nothing, better than using a less trustworthy provider, and better than relying on your ISP alone.

Blackout's apps are available for Android (Google Play and a direct APK), iOS, and Windows. The apps are custom builds on top of WireGuard and the Android app is open source on GitHub. On all platforms, your WireGuard keys also work with the official WireGuard apps if you prefer.

Get Blackout at blackoutvpn.au. Contact and support is via email at hide@blackoutvpn.au or through Session messenger (a messaging app that requires no phone number or email to use).

Enable the kill switch after setup. If the VPN connection drops, a kill switch stops all traffic until it reconnects, preventing accidental IP leaks.

Iceland is their recommended server for the strongest jurisdictional position. Australia, United States, Singapore, and Netherlands (Amsterdam) are the other regions.

WireGuard. Blackout is built on WireGuard, a modern VPN protocol known for its small codebase, strong cryptography, and faster performance compared to older protocols like OpenVPN. The simplicity of WireGuard's design makes it easier to audit for security problems.

Key model. Access to Blackout's service is controlled by WireGuard private keys, not accounts. Your key is validated against a one-way cryptographic hash stored on their servers. A one-way hash means Blackout cannot reverse the hash back to the original key, and the hash carries no identity information. This is meaningfully different from an account system.

Payment separation. Blackout keeps payment records separate from key delivery. The legal minimum payment metadata required by Australian tax law is retained (transaction ID, date, amount, for seven years), but this is not linked to any identity or to which keys were issued. PayPal payments are the least anonymous option because PayPal itself holds identity data; Monero and cash by mail avoid that entirely.

Legal exposure. Their privacy policy states that session data exists only in volatile RAM and is wiped on disconnect or server reboot. Traffic, DNS, and connection logs are not kept. Legal requests are complied with, but the practical result of a request is no meaningful data to hand over. This is a design decision, not a claim about policy.

Open source. The Android app and the Windows WireGuard fork are published on GitHub under the blackoutvpn organisation.

• VPNs explained, what a VPN does and does not do before you start
• Mullvad VPN, the other provider Anonsafe recommends, for the same underlying reason
• Metadata, what a VPN does not protect even when it works correctly
• Threat modeling, helps clarify whether a VPN is actually the right tool for your situation
• Tor, a different architecture for separating identity from network activity