Why the big concern about paying anonymously? You guys are clearly using VPNs for things I'm not.

The three things I use(d) a VPN for are both things of no interest to the NSA or any US government bit.
1) Accessing financial (and similar) services where I don't trust the local network operator, even with SSL (this is useful even in the US, at hotels/conferences, and
2) to access sites I didn't want visible to my past overly-snoopy employer (surprisingly, they didn't block VPNs), and
3) back when I was traveling outside the US regularly and for longer, to access US based streaming services (I've since seen a number of stories about Amazon/Hulu/Netflix blocking VPNs, so no idea if that's still useful.)

The first would all be subpoena-able by the government anyway. In theory the latter would be, although they wouldn't care. As for the middle, unless I worked for the government, they would be unlikely to care that I was visiting Monster/Indeed/Glassdoor/Hired or the occasional not-porn-but-potentially-NSFW site on company time. :D

Can someone please recommend a low cost VPN that would allow me to choose which server (i.e. where) I would like to get connected and not 'auto-route' me to a server which I have not chosen?

Not sure what your bar for low cost is, but Witopia does so (at least if you're comfortable editing the OpenVPN config file yourself; I use their service with the open source client, not with their software.)

you could try tunnelbear, it's free up to 500MB and 1.5GB with a tweet, or about 6$ a month. you can pick your VPN gateway easily, at fix it if you like.

This sounds promising - thanks much for the heads up;)

I have not installed it yet, but do you mind explaining how I could increase my data to 1.5GB "with a tweet"?

So to limit the data usage, I could log off and go to an unprotected mode when I am doing something harmless (like browsing FT :p) and then log in to the VPN when I do some banking / trading transactions?

once you have the app installed somewhere, you can tweet put in your twitter account name and tweet from inside the app (it goes out to twitter actually, so the credentials are not loaded in the app) and then boom you get a GB of additional VPN bandwidth. I use a throw away twitter account so nobody that follows my regular account sees the advert.

or just pay the 6$ a month for unlimited.

If you post a tweet on Twitter asking for a free Gig of data Tunnelbear, they will give you an extra allotment of free data for a month. You can post a tweet each month for another monthly increase in your limit. At least that used to be their promotion - I assume it's still active.

I've had Tunnelbear for years, and the user interface is incredibly easy - you can turn it on and off with a click, and you can choose one of 20 different countries from a drop-down menu. Easy peasy. I use it on my phone or laptop exactly like you described: turn it on for email and banking (for instance) but don't use it for general surfing. I have an unlimited plan ($50 a year), but I also use it at home for streaming sometimes (not Netflix).

Anyone try the Chrome extensions like Just Proxy VPN? I haven't tried it for something like streaming video but for masking my real IP.

But Chrome warns you that extensions which redirect traffic could be snooping on you?

I got it from the Chrome store where it has very high average review.

It's probably not a true VPN but a proxy server.

Chrome gives you that warning because it has no way of knowing who is running the proxy or what they're doing with the traffic you're redirecting to that proxy.

I have a modem/router combo at home but want to buy a second router and flash the firmware onto the second router and plug that into my home one (in essence creating 2 WiFi networks: home and home+vpn). Is this ridiculous and/or possible, what I'm asking?

I'm not generally into tinkering like that but the benefit would be instead of installing the VPN and running it on each client, I could simply encrypt traffic at the source.

If so, does anyone know StrongVPN, PureVPN, or Express VPN and can recommend any of them (or can advise to stay away)?

I do something similar on my home network. I use a T-mobile wifi cellspot router (rebadged ASUS RT-AC68U) which I have flashed to Tomato. I use the OpenVPN client there to connect to my VPN provider (I use private internet access). I then setup all computers I want to use the VPN to use static IPs with the router as the gateway. If I want to not use the VPN, I switch to DHCP and let my main router provide the IP configuration.

And like you, I wanted to run the VPN on my router so that I don't have to run the client on all of my computers/phones/devices.

I just turn on the Cellspot Router VPN running Open VPN.

I have the OpenVPN app running on my iOS devices. Mainly using at public wifi and when overseas and want to access US content.

So going back on this, I never ended up purchasing something as I'm still using a crappy VPN but looking to bite the bullet today.

Has anyone used PureVPN or can recommend them?

They have a 7 day money-back guarantee plus $62.10 for 3 years ($1.73/month). The offer seems fantastic, but curious if others here have encountered them before?

What is this?

Is this what you're talking about? https://play.google.com/store/apps/d....openvpn&hl=en
How much does it cost?

Yes, using the iOS version of that app.

However, you need a router with a VPN server. In my case, I got the router while I'm a T-Mobile customer. The router exports a file and you get that into your devices and the OpenVPN app. will connect to it.