What is everyone else using for VPN solutions and what are the trade offs?

I want a VPN to access all my personal devices and use services like Syncthing. I use it on my phone so it can’t use ungodly amounts of idle data.

I looked at Netbird but found the idle data usage almost 1GB per few days using JetBird with Lazy connections. I tried the default app but it makes me SSO login every day or two, it wouldn’t stay connected, and it still used a reasonable amount of idle data.

I looked at Tailscale but I’m not going to lock access to all my devices behind a Google account login or some other third party service login for no reason. It seems like hosting my own auth server is too much additional risk as well. I tried self hosting headscale which worked well except that I have no decent front end to easily add devices. I have to log into a terminal, then execute docker commands which was a huge pain in the ass. I didn’t even touch on any of the firewalling or routing that can be done because it was so much more complex in headscale then in a web interface. I tried hosting two or three headscale front ends but couldn’t get one working that supported most of the available feature set. Usually I was given generic connection errors with no clear way to diagnose or clear troubleshooting steps so after a few hours I moved on.

  • SayCyberOnceMore@feddit.uk
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    2 hours ago

    I have pfSense as my firewall, running OpenVPN and I just connect when I need to.

    Phone’s running trackercontrol all the time to block stuff and I’ve disabled most of google on it, so I’m not too concerned whilst I’m out and about… most apps I use are local-data anyway, ie CoMaps not google maps, etc… so I’m using ~1GB/month.

    Syncthing only syncs on known wifi, so when I’m home it updates with a NAS and 2 laptops (and photos with 2 tablets), so there’s always something it’s syncing with.