How to Set Up Surfshark on Every Device You Own

Surfshark’s one genuinely unmatched feature is unlimited simultaneous connections. I checked every serious competitor this month and the best any of them offers is 14 devices.

Most people who buy it install the app on a laptop and a phone and never use the rest. That is two of an unlimited allowance, which means paying for the one thing that separates this service from the cheaper ones and then leaving it on the table.

I run Ecommerce Paradise from overseas, so a VPN is how I reach US supplier portals and my own bank rather than a privacy preference. This is the order I would set one up in, built around the 30-day refund window and around the fact that the renewal price is never published, so the calendar matters more here than with any competitor.

One Subscription, Every Device You Own

No seat counting, no second licence when you add a contractor. Starter is $2.49 a month, billed $67.23 for 27 months.

See Surfshark Pricing →

Step 1: Pick the Tier Before You Install Anything

This is the step people get wrong, because the three plan cards on Surfshark’s pricing page ship an identical six-item feature list and distinguish themselves only by icon. Reading the accessibility labels underneath gives you the real gating.

Feature	Starter	One	One+
VPN	Yes	Yes	Yes
Alternative ID	Yes	Yes	Yes
Antivirus	No	Yes	Yes
Alert, breach monitoring	No	Yes	Yes
Identity theft coverage	No	No	Yes
Data removal by Incogni	No	No	Yes

The pricing follows that gating exactly. Starter is $2.49 a month, billed $67.23 for 27 months. One is $2.79, billed $75.33. One+ is $4.49, billed $121.23.

The step from Starter to One is 30 cents a month, which is $8.10 across the entire 27-month term, for antivirus and breach alerts. If you have any intention of running antivirus on the machines you are about to cover, that is not a decision worth deliberating over. Take One.

One+ is a real decision rather than a rounding error. The extra $1.70 a month buys automated removal of your details from data brokers plus identity theft coverage, and both are worth what they are worth depending on how exposed your details already are.

Every tier includes unlimited connections, so the tier choice has nothing to do with how many devices you are covering. That trips people up constantly.

Step 2: Understand What Unlimited Actually Means Here

One account, one password, any number of devices signed in at the same time. There is no seat count to manage, no admin console to provision from, and no upgrade path you hit later when the team grows.

That is genuinely unusual. Here is what the rest of the category does.

Service	Simultaneous connections
Surfshark	Unlimited
ExpressVPN Pro	14
NordVPN	10
PrivadoVPN	10
CyberGhost	7

The practical consequence is a different mental model. On CyberGhost you decide which devices deserve a slot. On Surfshark you stop deciding and just cover everything, which is the correct use of the product.

The flip side is that one password now unlocks your VPN on every machine in the business. Treat it like a shared credential, because that is what it is.

Step 3: Install in the Order That Protects the Refund Window

Surfshark gives 30 days, and that window starts from the purchase date rather than from first use. Buying in advance and installing three weeks later burns most of your protection for nothing.

So install on the day you buy, and install in this order.

First, the machine you do banking and supplier work on. This is the one that decides whether the purchase was a mistake, so it should be tested in the first hour rather than the third week.

Second, your phone. Mobile is where a VPN most often causes a surprise, because banking apps are stricter than banking websites about the network they see.

Third, everything else. Tablets, second laptops, the household devices, the TV. None of these can fail in a way that costs you money, so they come after the ones that can.

Leave the team devices until last, after you personally know the service works. Rolling out a VPN to a virtual assistant and then discovering it breaks your supplier portal means undoing it twice.

Step 4: Test the Things That Would Actually Ruin Your Month

The failure mode with a VPN is never that it refuses to connect. It is that it connects fine and then one specific thing you need silently does not work.

So inside the first week, deliberately run this list rather than waiting to discover it.

Log into your business bank. Business banking security is tuned to flag logins from data centre addresses, and a locked account means a phone call during business hours in a timezone you may not live in.

Open every supplier portal you use. Dealer portals are the single most common thing to break, because they are often built on older infrastructure with blunt IP rules.

Load your payment processor dashboard. Same problem, higher stakes, because a flagged login here can cascade into a payout review.

Try the regional service that made you want a VPN in the first place. If you bought it to reach one specific thing, confirm it reaches that specific thing before you roll it out to everything else.

If any of those fail, you are inside 30 days and you claim the refund. That is what the window is for, and almost nobody uses it deliberately.

Step 5: Cover a Team Without Buying Seats

This is where unlimited connections earns the price difference, and it is worth being precise about the trade.

Adding a partner, a virtual assistant and a contractor to a capped service means either buying a second subscription or juggling who is connected. On Surfshark it means sharing one credential, which is simpler and carries a real cost.

The cost is that a shared credential is only as controlled as your offboarding. When someone stops working with you, the correct response is to change the account password, which ends every signed-in session. Do that the same day, not the same month.

Worth doing the arithmetic on what the alternative would be. Covering 15 devices on a capped service means multiple subscriptions.

Covering 15 devices	Subscriptions	Cost per year	Per device per year
Surfshark Starter	1	$29.88	$1.99
CyberGhost	3	$71.64	$4.78
NordVPN Basic	2	$83.76	$5.58
ExpressVPN Pro	2	$143.76	$9.58

At 15 devices Surfshark costs less than half what the nearest alternative costs, and roughly a fifth of what ExpressVPN costs. That gap is the whole reason to pick it.

Running the Store From Overseas?

A VPN is one line item. Suppliers, entity, store and launch are the other four. We build all of it with you.

See the Done-For-You Build →

What to Do When Something Breaks

Something on that test list will fail for somebody reading this, so here is the order to work through before concluding the service is wrong.

Change server location first. Most access failures are the specific IP address rather than the VPN itself. Disconnect, pick a different city in the same country, reconnect and retry. This fixes the majority of supplier portal problems and costs 30 seconds.

Then try a different country, if the service allows it. A US supplier portal usually wants a US address, but a bank sometimes wants the country you actually live in. These two requirements can conflict, and the fix is often to be connected for one task and disconnected for the other.

Then use split tunnelling. Surfshark calls this Bypasser. It lets named apps and websites skip the VPN entirely while everything else stays protected. If your bank is the thing that breaks, putting the banking app outside the tunnel solves it permanently without turning the VPN off.

Then accept it and claim the refund. If a portal you cannot work without still refuses after those three steps, the service does not fit your situation and you are inside 30 days. There is no prize for persisting.

The mistake to avoid is turning the VPN off every time something is awkward and then turning it back on later. That habit is how people end up paying for a subscription they use twice a month.

Which Devices Are Actually Worth Covering

Unlimited does not mean you should install it on literally everything without thinking. A short inventory saves you troubleshooting later.

Device	Cover it?	Why
Work laptop	Yes, first	This is where supplier and banking access lives
Phone	Yes	Public wifi and banking apps, the two highest-risk contexts
Second laptop or desktop	Yes	Free under unlimited, and it removes a gap
Tablet	Yes	Same reasoning, no marginal cost
Team devices	Yes, last	Only after you personally know it works
Smart TV	Optional	Streaming access, not a business need
Router	Only if you know why	Covers everything at once, and breaks everything at once

That last row deserves a warning. Installing a VPN on the router covers every device on the network including ones that cannot run an app, which sounds ideal. It also means a single misconfiguration takes down internet access for the whole household, and it makes per-device troubleshooting considerably harder, because you can no longer just turn it off on one machine.

Start with the apps. Move to the router later if you have a specific reason, not as an opening move.

Step 6: Set the Reminder That Matters More Here Than Anywhere Else

Put a calendar reminder at month 25 of a 27-month term. Two months of warning.

This step is optional on most services and effectively mandatory on this one, because Surfshark does not publish its renewal price. Its FAQ answers the question of what it costs after two years by saying that upon renewal you will be charged the applicable renewal price, which is the shape of an answer with the number removed.

Every major competitor prints the figure. CyberGhost renews at a published $51.74 a year. ExpressVPN Basic at $99.95. NordVPN Basic at $139.08. Surfshark prints nothing, so the only way you will ever learn the number is by being there when it lands.

At month 25 you go and look at what the renewal turned out to be, and you make a live decision with the figure in front of you. That is the difference between choosing to stay and being charged for staying.

I worked through everything the page does and does not disclose in the Surfshark pricing breakdown, including the fact that only the 24-month tab’s prices are present in the page the server sends.

The One Thing Setup Cannot Fix

Worth being honest about a limit, because a setup guide that only sells the product is not much use.

Surfshark is a mainstream commercial VPN, and the places where mainstream commercial VPNs struggle are the places where a government is actively blocking them rather than a website is passively filtering them. If your reason for buying is reaching services from somewhere with national-level filtering, no amount of correct setup changes the underlying situation, and the shortlist for that problem is a different and much shorter one.

The same applies to a supplier who has deliberately blocked VPN traffic as policy rather than as a side effect of a fraud rule. Changing servers works against blunt IP reputation. It does not work against a vendor who has decided they do not want VPN connections at all.

Both of those are worth establishing in week one rather than week five, which is the whole argument for testing deliberately inside the refund window rather than discovering it later.

What Not to Bother With

Three things people spend time on during setup that do not repay it.

Server hopping for speed. A supplier portal loading in 3 seconds instead of 1 has never cost anybody an order. Pick a server in the country whose services you need and stop optimising.

Running the VPN on everything all the time. If your bank is in the country you are physically in, connecting through another country to reach it creates the exact flagging problem you are trying to avoid. Use it where it solves an access problem.

Buying the top tier for the insurance. Identity theft coverage reads impressively and rarely pays out in a way that matters to a small business. If you want One+, buy it for the data removal.

Where a VPN Fits in the Build Order

Worth saying, because this is a tool people buy early for reasons that do not survive questioning.

A VPN solves an access problem, not a business problem. If you are outside the United States and need to reach supplier portals, payment processors or your own bank, it is required infrastructure and belongs on the first invoice you pay. That is my situation and it is why I have never been without one.

If you are in the US and simply read that VPNs are good practice, $67.23 buys a habit that changes nothing about whether your store works. The attention is better spent on deciding what you sell, which the high-ticket niches list covers at no cost.

Supplier approval is the real constraint on this business and none of it turns on which VPN you picked. The process is laid out in the supplier outreach guide.

Distributors want a registered entity before they will discuss terms, which the business formation guide walks through. If the model itself is still the open question, read what high-ticket dropshipping actually is before buying any software at all.

Not Sure Surfshark Is the Right One?

Six alternatives compared on year-three cost and device caps, including the one that renews cheapest.

See the Alternatives →

Common Questions

How many devices can I use Surfshark on?
Unlimited simultaneous connections, on every plan including Starter. The tier you choose affects which extra products you get, not how many devices you can cover.

Which Surfshark plan should I set up?
One, for almost everyone. It costs 30 cents a month more than Starter, which is $8.10 across the whole 27-month term, and adds antivirus and breach alerts. Take Starter only if you are certain you will not use either.

Can I share one Surfshark account with my team?
Yes, and that is the point of unlimited connections. It is one credential rather than managed seats, so change the account password the day anyone stops working with you, which ends every signed-in session.

How long do I have to test it?
Thirty days, counted from the purchase date rather than from first use. Install on the day you buy and test your bank, your supplier portals and your payment processor in the first week.

What happens when the 27 months end?
It renews annually, but Surfshark does not publish the amount in advance. Its FAQ says only that you will be charged the applicable renewal price. Set a calendar reminder at month 25 so you find out on your schedule rather than theirs.

Should I run the VPN on every device all the time?
No. Use it where it solves an access problem. Connecting through another country to reach a bank in the country you are physically in creates the flagging problem you are trying to avoid.

Trevor Fenner

Trevor Fenner is an ecommerce entrepreneur and the founder of Ecommerce Paradise, a platform focused on helping entrepreneurs build and scale profitable high-ticket ecommerce and dropshipping businesses. With over a decade of hands-on experience, Trevor specializes in high-ticket dropshipping strategy, niche and product selection, supplier recruiting and onboarding, Google & Bing Shopping ads, ecommerce SEO, and systems-driven automation and scaling. Through Ecommerce Paradise, he provides free education via in-depth guides like How to Start High-Ticket Dropshipping, advanced training through the High-Ticket Dropshipping Masterclass, and fully done-for-you turnkey ecommerce services for entrepreneurs who want a faster, more hands-off path to growth. Trevor is known for emphasizing sustainable, real-world ecommerce models over hype-driven tactics, helping store owners build scalable, sellable, and location-independent brands.