FAQ

Regular VPNs route you through IP addresses shared by thousands of strangers. Banks, brokerages, and streaming services flag those IPs and lock you out or ask for extra verification. Ownhearth uses your own home connection, so you look like exactly who you are — you, at home.

Tailscale is excellent for linking your own devices, but using it as a full exit-node back home tends to break in real travel use — MTU issues and some apps misbehave — and managing the box gets captured by the very tunnel you depend on. We ran exactly that before building Ownhearth. A pure DIY WireGuard setup can work too, but then you own the hard parts: DDNS, port-forwarding, kill-switch routing, and making it recover when hotel Wi-Fi flakes. Ownhearth is that entire stack, set up for you and self-healing — on hardware you keep.

No. The setup is a one-time fee. After that, your VPN runs on your own routers at no recurring cost. There's an optional yearly plan if you'd like us to actively monitor your connection and fix issues proactively — but it's optional, and your VPN keeps working without it.

Two small GL.iNet routers — one travels with you, one stays home (about $170 total). We tell you exactly which to buy on Amazon. You own them and keep them forever.

No. You download a small helper app, click once, and paste a claim code. It configures both routers for you. Most people are done in about ten minutes, no command line or config files.

By design, your internet pauses until the VPN is back on, rather than quietly falling back to your real location. That's the safety feature, not a glitch: it's designed so your bank or brokerage sees your home IP, not a foreign one. It reconnects on its own if the tunnel hiccups; and if you ever deliberately switch it off in the router, just switch it back on (one tap) to get online. In short: VPN on = your home IP; VPN off = no internet, on purpose.

No. Your data flows directly between your two routers and never touches our servers. We keep only a tiny management channel to help your routers pair and to alert you if one goes offline.

Some home connections — often cellular or certain fiber/apartment setups — don't allow incoming connections, which this needs. Run our 1-minute pre-check before you buy; it tells you honestly whether your connection will work.

Setup needs one small port (UDP 51820) opened on your home router. If that router is one you can't change — a managed mesh like Eero, a landlord's, or a shared house — you'll need whoever manages it to add a quick one-time rule (we send the exact steps), or to use an internet connection you control. Not sure about your situation? Email us before you buy and we'll help you figure out the right fit.

First, connect your device to the router's 5 GHz Wi-Fi (the network with "5G" in the name). The 2.4 GHz band is often crowded — especially in apartments and hotels — and can be slow even at full signal, while 5 GHz usually fixes it instantly. Past that, your speed is bounded by the internet where you're staying and your home connection's upload speed.

Usually no — setup opens the one needed port automatically. But some home routers ship with that automatic feature turned off. If yours does, your home box tells us, and we email you the exact 2-minute, one-time steps to forward a single port (UDP 51820) to it. After that it just works — and it's a one-time change, not something you'll touch again.

You're connecting through your own home internet — the same connection you'd use sitting on your couch. You're not faking a location or hiding behind someone else's server; you're literally using your real home line from afar. That's a normal, legitimate use of your own internet. As always, follow the terms of the specific services you use.

It's as fast as your home internet's upload speed, since everything routes through your house. That's plenty for banking, logins, email, and browsing — which is what this is for. It isn't designed to be faster than your home connection, and it won't speed up large downloads.

Your VPN keeps running. It's on your hardware, using open WireGuard — it doesn't depend on us to keep working. That's the whole point of owning it.

Email support from a real person — no scheduling a call to fix a dropped connection. Setup includes 30 days; the yearly plan keeps priority support going.

Yes. Only your travel router's traffic routes out through home. Everyone on your home network keeps browsing normally — the home box just answers your travel router's connection quietly in the background.

Yes. Connect your phone or laptop to the travel router's Wi-Fi and it uses your home IP too — there's no app to install on the phone itself.

For logging into and watching your own accounts from abroad, yes — you appear to be at home. It's limited by your home internet's upload speed, so very high-bitrate 4K can buffer if your home upload is slow.

Your setup tracks your home connection automatically. If you switch ISP or replace your home router, email us — it's usually a quick re-point, not a re-buy.

Those captive portals usually work: connect the travel router to the hotel Wi-Fi, complete the sign-in page once from a connected device, and the tunnel comes up. A few unusual portals don't play nicely — if one doesn't, email us and we'll help.

Only what's needed to pair your routers and tell whether one is offline — never your browsing or traffic contents. Full details are in our Privacy Policy at ownhearth.com/legal/privacy.