Some thoughts:
1. You have to keep two ports locked down. If you can secure your own laptop, you can secure a cloud instance. The cloud instance you're basically just using as a proxy is a lot less important than what's on your phone or computer.
2. Only you are using the system, and you're not logging. Have an issue? Tear it down and start another. Automated scripts out there generate unique keys every time.
3. A commercial VPN is a honeypot in a way -- it's a ripe target. Many people are tunneling through it, doing sketchy things that certain parties want to track -- and your traffic could get caught in a dragnet (this, of course, depends on your use case: you may want to blend in).
4. Your ISP tracks and sells your data. I mean, the entire reason I use a VPN is because I was sick of my ISP routing my searches through their servers before my intended search destination, snagging my Netflix info and using it to create advertising profiles. Why would you trust them?
5. It literally takes less than 10 minutes (5:59 from an iPhone, the last time I launched one) to launch and connect to your own VPN instance to play with (https://github.com/jenh/sevenminutevpn is mine, but there are others, like Streisand or Algo) -- if nothing else, you become a more educated consumer and can better understand your threat model AND what to look for in a paid provider.