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Don't let me ruin your good time, but my experience with Surf shark:
Used surf shark for about 3 years around pandemic timeframe. Had no complaints (other than it drained my phone battery super fast - didn't test empirically, but seemed somewhat worse than other VPN providers). I was unemployed for a while, so took the opportunity to cut expenses; tried to drop my surf shark subscription. It was a HUGE pain in the butt. I forget the process, but iirc, you had to use their help chat to get the number for cancellations, they kept me on hold for ~10 min, then had a long winded questionnaire ("were required to ask you these questions before proceeding") asking why I was quitting, then made an offer for discounted months before letting me unsubscribe.
Its my understanding regulations have changed such that that's not allowed anymore and also that most VPN can elations are about that bad anyway, but still, wanted to share my experience. Lol, suppose so long as you never quit, you won't have to deal with all that.
do you have a more current preference/recommendation?
Ah, yeah, that sucks. In Europe you can always cancel by just not paying for a subscription, so I've rarely had experiences like this. Only time it happened to me was when I had been stupid enough to have a New York Times subscription (gah) and decided to end it. Huge pain in the ass.
With Surfshark I bought a two-year subscription without automatic renewal, so I get what I paid for and then it's done. But I'm sorry to hear about their bad business practices—it goes well with the overall sleazy look of their website. Hopefully I'll find something better by the time the subscription period is over. :)
Thanks for letting me know! I try to avoid any company that doesn't have open source software as the core of their business strategy, but with VPN that's a bit tricky.