The first question you should ask is why you want a VPN. Because I believe many people newer ask this question and have some vague idea about "it somehow improves security and/or privacy". In most situations this likely isn't true. You add an additional attack vector and you centralize your communication to a single point.
100% this. VPN marketing appears to have really gotten to people, everyone's always asking about it. Real reasons I can see to use a VPN service 1) You want your traffic to reliably egress in that country. i.e. I live in New Zealand but to access some Australian TV on demand, I need to "appear" in Australia. 2) Errr, I can't think of any others. If you are really trying to hide your traffic from your ISP: 1) Change I…
In that case, a few bucks per month is a pretty good deal - it won't protect me if the NSA or any of their FVEYs friends get curious about me specifically, but it _will_ protect me against all my internet metadata getting bulk collected by my ISP and handed over to "national security" relevant agencies, such as local councils, dog catchers, and the taxi commission (yes, those agencies really do request and gain access to ISP metadata!)
I can and have run my own VPN (and VPN-like) endpoints on cheapo vpses, but it's worth my while/time to pay FSecure/Freedome, to do that for me.