One VPN plan on five devices: how device slots work

A VPN plan that covers five devices lets one subscription protect several of your devices without buying it five times. The catch is that "five devices" means different things to different apps: some count installs, some count simultaneous connections, and some hand out one slot per platform. Which model your app uses decides whether a second Android phone adds a device or replaces one.

The three ways apps count devices

The first model is the simplest to explain and the easiest to hit by accident, because a phone you sold two years ago still holds a place. The second is the most flexible for a household, because a phone that is off does not count. The third is the most predictable, because you always know which device holds which slot.

Why a slot per platform family

A VPN is not one app; it is one app per operating system, each built against that system's own VPN interface. Android gives an app a VpnService; other systems give it something else entirely. Tying a slot to the platform family means the account keeps one registration per kind of device, and each registration carries the key that device uses to authenticate its tunnel.

That design has a consequence you should know before you buy: the slot is held by the platform, not by the physical device. Sign in on a second Android phone and it takes the Android slot from the first one. The app offers replacement, not a second Android slot. If you want two Android phones protected under one email at the same time, that is not what a per-platform model gives you, and it is worth checking before paying rather than after.

What a slot actually holds

When a device claims a slot, it registers a public key with the account. From then on the server can tell that a tunnel request comes from that registration without ever learning which person is behind it. The VPN servers themselves see less still: an opaque connection id per tunnel, no account, no email, no list of sibling devices.

This is why a slot moving from one phone to another is a small event. The new phone registers its own key, the old registration is retired, and no tunnel key is ever copied between devices. It also means a lost phone does not hold anything that lets someone else use your plan for long: signing in on the replacement takes the slot back.

Getting a new phone

Moving to a new phone under a per-platform model is deliberately boring:

1. Install the app from Google Play on the new phone.
2. Open the Premium tab and sign in with the email you used when you bought the plan.
3. The Android slot moves to the new phone. The old phone drops back to the free tier the next time it checks in.

There is no code to transfer and no device to "deactivate" first. The full walk-through, including what to do if the email is wrong, is in restoring a subscription on a new phone.

What does not carry across devices

Signing in restores the entitlement: every location, the Premium session length, and the slot. It does not copy settings from one device to another. Which apps you excluded from the tunnel, whether Always-on VPN is enabled, and which city you last connected to are all stored on the phone, and each new device starts fresh. That is intentional. A split-tunnel exclude list is a list of package names, and the packages on your tablet are not the packages on your phone, so copying it across would be wrong more often than right. The post on which apps to exclude covers rebuilding that list in a minute.

Devices versus people

"Five devices" is a device count, not a family plan. If the people in your household each have one phone, one plan covering five of them only works under a simultaneous-connection model, and even then everyone shares one sign-in. Under a per-platform model, each Android phone needs its own account. The trade-offs are laid out in sharing a VPN plan with family, including the case where the free tier is the right answer for the second phone.

Questions to ask before you pay

• Does the limit count installs, live connections or platform slots?
• Can a second phone of the same kind be added, or does it replace the first?
• What is needed to move the plan to a new phone, and is a lost phone a problem?
• Does the server ever learn which devices belong to the same account?

The answers are usually in the help pages rather than the store listing, and the free versus premium post has more on what else changes when you pay.

Culvert VPN Premium covers up to five devices with one slot per platform family, so on Android a second phone replaces the first, and signing in with your email on the new phone moves the slot in one step; it is on Google Play.