Free is a con.
If you want a cheap VPN that you control (and that's faster than Tor), set up an endpoint on something that takes Bitcoin payment and pay with Bitcoins obtained via an anonymous route. This list might be helpful.
Okay but please don't mention 'Tor' side by side with VPNs they are essentially different services/solutions, for different needs. Even on HN I see that many people are so confused about Tor that consider the traffic encrypted by default (when it's not not) or they use tor to perform the usual daily web operations (Facebook, twitter, email, etc.) which totally beat the purpose of Tor but would be excellent use case for a (paid or self-hosted) VPN.
I wrote a script to spin up a new instance when I need it, and to terminate it when I don't. It should cost less than $10/mo, and I only pay for what I use.
Hosting you own VPN server seems overkill for this kind of use case. There are many trustworthy VPN providers that I'd recommend for use cases unrelated tor BitTorrent. A couple of years ago people recommended SwissVPN over and over to me, though I've never used it. I was a happy IPredator customer for quite some time.
If you want to host your own VPN server (let's face it, servers are useful anyway), I'd recommend cloud providers other than Amazon. Iceland, Sweden and Germany are very friendly countries.
There's a fundamental difference here. With EC2, you get a server that knows who you are and what you're saying (at least they know who you're talking with, if you use HTTPS). The TOR entry node only knows who you are, but knows nothing about who you're communicating with or what you're saying.
There is always a server that knows who you are.
Whether it's an OpenVPN server hosted on an EC2
instance or a TOR entry node.
There's always a server that knows something - but using EC2 means it is extremely easy to tie to your identity through your credit card, shipping and billing addresses, etc.
And Amazon is in bed with everyone VPN users might want to stay anonymous from - so EC2 is an exceptionally poor choice if you care about anonymity.
https://gist.github.com/anonymous/223853355d67123fdda8
This assumes that you are somewhat familiar with EC2 and have already set up a keypair and a security group that allows incoming port 22. Just read the instructions at the top and change the settings to fit your needs.
Set your browser to use SOCKS host 127.0.0.1, port 5222 (or whatever you change it to). This allows you to have a browser using the tunnel and everything else using your native connection.
Let me know if you have any questions.