I purchased this lifetime deal last month and was surprised to see the rating go down since then. I've had a great experience so far. No issues while using the VPN to many different servers. I travel a lot so I've tested in many places in the US, South America, and Europe.

The NYC streaming server has worked perfectly for me to watch Netflix and Amazon Prime abroad. Outside of streaming, I try to choose servers in countries with the best privacy protections, like Switzerland. The farther the server is from me though the more of a speed loss I see, but I think this is true of any VPN.

Within the EU I'd say I see a 20-30% speed drop connecting to Switzerland. From farther away like the US, it might be as high as 40-50%. In the US I usually connect to Canada, where again the drop is more minimal at 20-30%.

I'd say the speed drop and quantity of streaming-capable servers (NYC, London, Mumbai) are the biggest drawbacks to choosing Oyster over the big players in the market, but for the price Oyster is definitely worth it for me!

Side note for Google/Android TV users:

I also set up OysterVPN on my Google TV streaming stick and it was hard to sign in to my account because the Android app isn't optimized for Google TV, but after a couple minutes I was able to figure it out, and it works great once signed in.

[Editing to reply to the Oyster team's comment below]

Thanks Jason! That sounds great. Regarding my experience on Google TV, there wasn't an error I encountered. The issue was a usability problem that made it challenging to sign in. My arrow key input kept getting switched to the onboarding visuals on the left hand side and I couldn't get back to the password input. I think there might have been one other similar UX issue, but again I eventually got my account info entered and everything is fine now.