Your server. Your IP. Your trip.
If the April 2026 exit left you without a China setup, a private server nobody shares is the sturdier replacement. Free 3-day trial, then $9.99 for the week.
LetsVPN (快连) was the budget favorite for China, until April 2026, when the company announced it could no longer sustain service for the mainland market after weeks of escalating blocking. If it was your China VPN, this page is about what to use instead.
Every pass or subscription provisions a private server with an IP address only you use, so there's no well-known commercial endpoint for censors to blocklist. Smart routing keeps WeChat, Alipay, and local maps fast while Instagram, WhatsApp, and YouTube flow through the tunnel. $9.99 for 7 days, no account.
One-tap connect, cheap short passes, an automatic mode that left Chinese apps direct, and for years it genuinely outperformed most Western VPNs against the firewall. Its instincts about what travelers need were correct.
When one company routes hundreds of thousands of users through its own endpoints, those endpoints become the target. LetsVPN's April 2026 mainland exit is what losing that fight looks like. Private per-user servers don't present that target.
LetsVPN details from its own site, blog, and independent 2025-2026 reviews, as of August 2026.
| Traveler's VPN | LetsVPN | |
|---|---|---|
| Mainland China service | Private server per user with a clean, unshared IP; install before you land | Announced April 2026 it could not continue operations for the mainland market; refunds promised |
| Cost for a one-week trip | $9.99, one-time Travel Pass, 1 TB of data | Short passes were cheap (a few dollars a week) when available |
| Devices per plan | iPhone, iPad, and Mac in one purchase, Family Sharing included | 2 simultaneous devices on the base plan; more devices means paying more |
| Account required | None. No email, no signup, purchases through Apple | Account plus device-ID fingerprinting; advertised 72-hour trial often granted as 1-24 hours in practice per reviewers |
| Who runs it | An indie iOS developer; company and pricing on the public record, App Store purchase protections apply | Operator ("LetsGo Network") with no named team, no disclosed jurisdiction, and payment entities traced to Singapore/Hong Kong per independent reviews |
| Logging | BYO mode: your traffic never touches our servers. Managed mode: your private server, no shared infrastructure aggregating users | Its own policy permits device IDs, timestamps, purchase and diagnostic data; reviewers class it as not a no-logs VPN, with no independent audit |
| Smart routing | Automatic per-destination profiles, updated rule sets, works the same on iPhone, iPad, and Mac | Auto Mode proxied blocked sites and left Chinese apps direct (a preset toggle, not configurable) |
| Kill switch / open protocols | Built on sing-box with standard protocols (Outline/Shadowsocks, WireGuard, Trojan) | No kill switch; proprietary closed-source protocol, unaudited |
| Bring your own server | $2.99 one-time unlock | Not supported |
LetsVPN's mainland-market exit was announced April 28, 2026 and reported consistently across multiple independent outlets quoting the company's notice. The app remains listed on international App Stores; if its mainland service returns, we'll update this page.
Through 2025, LetsVPN earned its reputation honestly: independent testing had it connecting through the Great Firewall far more reliably than the big Western brands, with a dead-simple app and trip-sized pricing. Then came the spring 2026 blocking campaign. After roughly three weeks of escalating disruption its team said it was adjusting to "hourly," the company announced on April 28, 2026 that it could not continue operations targeting mainland China.
The lesson isn't that LetsVPN was bad at this. It's that any service routing a huge user base through company-operated endpoints hands the censor a finite, findable list of targets. When the pressure ratcheted up, the list got exhausted.
Traveler's VPN is built on the opposite structure. Each user gets a private server, provisioned on demand, with an ordinary cloud IP address that no one else uses and no blocklist knows. There's no central fleet whose discovery kills service for everyone at once. On top of that sits the routing engine LetsVPN's Auto Mode gestured at, done properly: per-destination rules that keep local apps direct and fast while Instagram, WhatsApp, Gmail, and YouTube tunnel, on iPhone, iPad, and native Mac.
And the trust equation is simpler. LetsVPN asked users to trust an anonymous operator with a closed protocol and a logging-permissive policy. With Traveler's VPN there's no account to create, purchases run through Apple, the tunnel is standard open protocols via sing-box, and in BYO mode your traffic never touches infrastructure we operate at all.
No. The April 2026 announcement covered its mainland China operations, and the company said it would refund affected users. The app remains available on international App Stores. But if your reason for using it was China connectivity, that's the part that ended.
Blocking works by identifying endpoints. A commercial VPN's servers carry thousands of users and known traffic signatures, so they're worth finding and blocking, and once found, everyone on them goes dark. A private server is one ordinary cloud IP carrying one user's traffic over standard protocols. There's nothing to put on a blocklist until it's observed, and no one else's blocking takes you down. No approach is guaranteed against the firewall, but the private model removes the shared single point of failure.
Independent reviewers consistently flagged the same concerns: an operator with no public identity or jurisdiction, a privacy policy permitting device and usage logging, no kill switch, and no independent audit. The common framing was "fine for casual browsing, don't do banking on it." Traveler's VPN takes the opposite posture: no account, App Store purchase protections, standard open protocols, and no shared infrastructure aggregating your traffic with strangers'.
Download the app before you fly (App Stores are unreachable from the mainland without a VPN), start the free 3-day trial or buy a $9.99 Travel Pass, pick the China travel profile, and connect. Your private server is provisioned automatically; there's no account to create.
If the April 2026 exit left you without a China setup, a private server nobody shares is the sturdier replacement. Free 3-day trial, then $9.99 for the week.