"It might be worth getting a VPN if you use sketchy WiFi often, or want to bypass geo-blocking or restrictive firewalls. But remember that you’re trusting the VPN provider with all your traffic."

I never understand this false dichotomy - especially in a forum which is named ... let me check ... "hacker news".

Just set up your own.

It costs almost nothing to run a EC2 instance in the region of your choice (or at some other provider like GCS or whatever). There are keystroke-by-keystroke instructions everywhere on setting this up.

Extra points for adding the extremely trivial and also very low cost steps of signing up under a corporate name and removing your personal identity from the account altogether.

Some more extra points for multiplying the almost-zero-cost by 3 or 4 or 5 and spinning up extra copies of your endpoint in multiple regions (or even providers) and manually (or automatically) switching between them.

You don't need to trust anyone - adjust your threat model all the way up to "near nation state" (in the case of Amazon or GCS) and assume these actors could already discern all of your Internet traffic even if you weren't doing business with them.

Christ.