The VPNs you characterise as “shitty” aren’t necessarily a bad choice; they’re cheaper than the legitimate privacy VPNs. Mullvad is famously 5€ per month, Proton is 4.49€ per month, but NordVPN is 3.09€, Surfshark is 2.19€, and PIA is 1.79€ per month.
If you’re really just here to pretend you’re in another country (rather than privatemaxing) or hide your torrenting activity from your ISP, the cheaper options can be a perfectly legitimate choice.
Mullvad doesn’t try and lock you in with any auto-renewal shenanigans and was the second service that I know of to offer payment via xmr. The first was ivpn but their server speeds were trash.
That’s true. Mullvad will even let you send cash by post to them which is definitely not something you can do with other services.
However, in terms of private payment options, you can always use BTC’s Lightning Network with the other options if that concerns you.
https://thatoneprivacysite.xyz/ is a good base for comparisons
Bear in mind that info hasn’t been updated since 2019, when the OG thatoneprivacysite sold out to a shady company. The .xyz site is an old backup someone put up of the site before it changed to only recommend a handful of bad VPNs.
