Indeed. From the title I imagined a setup that launched an EC2 machine and then shut it down after disconnection. That’s the only way to pay cents per month assuming you’re not connected to a VPN 24/7

Managing your own server at 5$/month does not make sense from any perspective other than “privacy” if you believe that.

you can get a performant 4 core arm64 vps from oracle for free, had no speed impediment with wireguard on it. It's free 24/7... the affordability of arm...

The only downside is VPN provider endpoints are blocked by many services.

You have the same problem on most VPS providers too.

It's getting to the point where anything other than a censored, throttled, traffic shaped, surveilled, overpriced, residential ISP IP is a second class citizen. It's a real bummer.

I use a router behind my router at home that runs 100% of my traffic over a VPN before it leaves the building. Any services that don't work, I simply don't use them. Someone else will take my money.

The only option I found to work was to have friends with a spare /24 willing to peer with your BGP router, unfortunately

I wish I had friends like that.

Yup. Got me a Racknerd VPS for fairly cheap and made it a PiVPN for fun, but things like Netflix don't work.

I used to use a very cheap NAT VPS as an OpenVPN server but after it got terminated I found CyberGhost. It is a lot more flexible and usable across multiple devices with the downside of not being able to open incoming ports.

Your commercial VPN provider may collect data about you (and make larger profit from it, not from your fee). I don't mean using commercial VPN is bad, just keeping this in mind.

My VPS costs 2$/month.

How much traffic do you get? What software? OpenVPN is a resource hog.

I'm on a $10/year VPS with 100 Gb/month traffic. Not great, but not terrible.

> OpenVPN is a resource hog.

Not in my experience. Using it now on a super budget VPS ($4/year), very little CPU/memory usage even when streaming video.