I'd consider myself tech savvy and I happily pay for a VPN (PIA). I don't want to manage a node, and at $40/year it's about equal to what I'd pay otherwise.
I guess it takes an average HN reader 1 hour to setup a VPN. If the purpose is have a secured gateway for using public wifi, it serves the purpose. However, if you want to gain anonymity, it does not work since the node has a unique IP and only you are using this IP. You still need different users to use this VPN to gain anonymity.
Therefore, we could only choose one of the following: security or anonymity, but not both, unless you becomes your own VPN provider and serves some customers for anonymity.
An alternative is Tor, but a compromised exit node still leaks HTTP site.
So, if someone could solve this problem, it would be a big selling point. I am not sure if it is possible to share an IP between different VPN nodes without an untrusted gateway in front.
In my country, VPNs sometimes get blocked. Along with half of the AWS and other random stuff.
So I've set up my VPN and also pay for another third-party VPN service, having best (or worst) of both worlds.
My gateway host is private, and I've decided that if it gets detected, I'll add an obfs4 layer on top of it. (Luckily, that hadn't happened - and I'm moving to another country in about a week. But that's a different story.)
All my first VPN does, is merely routing the traffic to an upstream VPN provider. This way I get a private entry point but also enjoy some degree of anonymity as my "final" IP addresses are shared with lots of other users. (Well, I share my gateway VPN with a few close friends. Maybe that's borderline cheating on the upstream VPN, but I don't see a way to pay them for my network-sharing guests anyway.)
Oh, and I don't need to reconnect to switch regions. I just made myself a tiny web service that changes the routing table used by my TAP connection, so whenever something doesn't work from one region I just need to click on a flag icon.
I ran this script on a node 2 years ago and haven't had to touch it since, it's been a fully-working, reliable VPN for my whole family for $2.50/mo and 10min of my time for initial setup: https://github.com/jawj/IKEv2-setup
If you're interested in setting up your own VPN, take a look at streisand [0].
Also, running the VPN in a docker container is rather nice. There are a bunch of existing containers for that[1].
Oh, and if you're interested, Aruba Cloud [2] offers a 1 Core, 1GB ram VM in CZ and IT for 1 Euro/month. It comes with more than enough bandwidth for personal use.
