I use a Digital Ocean droplet and local forwarding.
$ ssh -q -D [port] [droplet-hostname]
Then setup my browser to use a proxy at localhost on [port]. Works great. You can get a "droplet", in Digital Ocean Parlance (i.e., "VPS") for as little as $5/mo, which includes 1TB/mo of data transfer. I assume other options like Linode, Vultr, etc would work as well.
It's very easy to use and setup, just do
sshuttle -r username@12.34.56.789 0/0
sshuttle -r username@12.34.56.789 -x 12.34.56.789 0.0.0.0/0
I'll be honest though, haha, 10% of my VPN usage is legitimate stuff and 90% is just so I can feel safe streaming things illegally that are otherwise hard to purchase. So I switched over to a third party for the simplicity. If I wanted to do more than avoid an email from my ISP I would definitely go back to rolling my own. (I'm also grandfathered into PIA's older cheaper price tier which makes it easier).
That's pretty funny. I am from Kazakhstan myself and our largest (pretty much monopolist) internet provider has been encouraging ""piracy"" for as long as I can remember.
About 10 years ago a bunch of local media companies (making money from selling badly translated Hollywood movies/video games/etc) lobbied a new law making operating all torrent trackers illegal, and banning access to everything they could find carpet bombing-style.
Well, the ban lasted for less than a week, and was lifted after some heavy lobbying by said provider, who was beginning to lose a share of their most valuable customers.
Here's another anecdote: in ~2012, when I was getting an FTTH connection, their representative used a popular torrent on my machine to measure the upload/download speeds through the freshly laid cable.
https://broadbandnow.com/Fiber
I live in Nashville and we have FTTH from both AT&T and Google as well as gigabit service from Comcast. I think the problem is the US is really, really big and we widely deployed cable which has been "good enough" (DOCSIS 3.x at 300, 500Mb/s or more) that there historically hasn't been much incentive for people to deploy really expensive fiber networks.
But it is certainly improving all the time. I think services like Starlink and fixed 5G are really driving carriers to start deploying more fiber to compete.
I have been serving 10-20 TB each month with no complaints from my provider.
But you have to remember that we make something like 5-10 times less than Americans. 100 Mb/s is still very affordable though.
There are even much cheaper virtual server offerings, as one probably doesn't need 1 GB of RAM and a dedicated IP for personal VPN or proxy.
An ssh proxy is great, but might as well just use OpenVPN if you’re hosting on DO or Vultr since I believe they both have prebuilt images you can deploy with a single click.