TL;DR: The thing that broke my trust wasn't a breach. It was a court document.

📖 Reading time: ~39 min

What's in this article

Why I Stopped Trusting Commercial VPNs and Started Hosting My Own

How I'm Evaluating These (My Actual Criteria)

WireGuard (Raw): The One Everything Else Is Built On

Headscale: WireGuard with a Control Plane You Own

Netbird: The One I Tried for a Team Setup

OpenVPN: The Veteran I Keep Around for One Specific Job

Algo VPN: The 'I Need This in 20 Minutes' Option

Side-by-Side Comparison: The Honest Version

Why I Stopped Trusting Commercial VPNs and Started Hosting My Own

The thing that broke my trust wasn't a breach. It was a court document. I was running a threat model review for a side project when I stumbled onto a forum post linking to a published legal filing — my VPN provider, who had plastered "zero logs, ever" across their homepage, had responded to a law enforcement data request with connection timestamps and originating IPs. Not metadata. Actual connection records.…