Mullvad blocked at the ISP here — what actually gets through?

I have been on Mullvad for years and I am not looking to leave it on principle, but I have a site where it simply does not connect and I need to know what people are using instead.

The situation: a client office whose ISP is dropping WireGuard handshakes. Not throttling, dropping. Mullvad has no obfuscation layer of its own to fall back on, which has never been a gap for me before and is a hard blocker here. The account model, the flat five euros and the cash-by-post option are all still the best in the market as far as I am concerned, so I would like to keep the shape of that and change only the transport.

What I am asking for is specific: an operator with the same account-number signup and no email, that also has something that survives DPI. I have not tested any of the obfuscation options seriously, so treat me as a beginner on that part.

If the ISP can drop it selectively they can see it. Decide which of those two facts bothers you more.

Try tcp on 443 first before you buy anything else.

Tried that first. It is DPI, not port — same handshake dies on 443.

IVPN is the direct answer to the shape you described and I have run it in a similar situation for about a year.

Same model you want: an account ID at signup, no email, BTC or Monero, independently audited. On top of that it has the things Mullvad has deliberately never built — multi-hop chains, port forwarding, and an obfuscation mode that got through a DPI setup that was eating plain WireGuard for me. Gibraltar rather than Sweden, which is a different bet on jurisdiction, and whether that is better or worse depends on who you think is coming.

The qualification is the pricing, and it is a real one for this crowd. The headline six dollars is a three-year prepay. Monthly is meaningfully more, and paying three years up front to an anonymous account is exactly the commitment the account model exists to let you avoid. I pay monthly and accept the worse rate, because the alternative is optimising the price of a thing I bought for a different reason.

So: not a strict upgrade on Mullvad. A different product that happens to do the one thing you need.

Three years prepaid to an anonymous account. What happens when they fold in year two?

Proton has the stealth thing built in and it works for me!

It does work, and it costs you the thing the man asked to keep.

Proton wants an email at signup. He specifically asked for the account-number model with no email, because an email is a durable identifier that outlives the subscription and sits in a record somewhere with session times beside it. Suggesting a mainstream operator with a mandatory identifier to somebody who opened by saying he wants no identifier is answering a different question.

The Swiss position is genuinely good and the audits are genuinely repeated. Neither of those undoes the email.

A point that will not interest most of this thread, but it is a real difference between the two suggestions. Gibraltar and Switzerland are not equivalent for a business buying this as an expense rather than an individual buying it for themselves.

If this is going on a company's books, the Swiss entity issues an invoice a finance department will accept without a conversation, and the Gibraltar one may or may not depending on how the account was opened. Anonymity and deductibility pull in opposite directions and somebody eventually has to reconcile them; better it happens now than at year end.

I realise that is not the constraint anyone here optimises for.

Reporting back so the thread has an ending.

Went with IVPN, monthly rather than the three-year, on Ravenstack's point — which I think is the right instinct even though the discount is genuinely large. Obfuscation mode connected first attempt at the site that was dropping WireGuard and has stayed up for two weeks with no drops I have noticed.

I am keeping the Mullvad subscription. Different tools: one for everything ordinary at five euros with the cleanest account model in the market, one for the site that needs the transport tricks. That is not the tidy single answer I wanted when I opened this, but it is the correct one. Marking solved.