If FOSS is a concern you could look into NetBird. They also have a hosted alternative but as far as I know the entire stack is FOSS.
It’d still be a matter of trusting a private company though.
this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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Tbh I couldn't set up Netbird in a way that I'm happy with. I'd like to use it with an external Caddy and Authelia but the setup is so terribly documented and has various bugs I have given up.
Actually, they seem to have a tls-passtough mode, which would allow me to handle encryption myself
Yeah, I will maybe look into it, thanks. Allthough, at that point I could also probably trust Pangolin aswell, their stuff is also mostly FOSS
Move over to racknerd. I pay $17 a year for my VPS to host Pangolin and it works great. They even have cheaper options than that too.
lowendbox.com is where I go looking for good deals on VPSs.
https://lowendbox.com/blog/1-vps-1-usd-vps-per-month/
I've been using the $10.28/year Racknerd deal on that page to run my Netbird server since the start of the year. It's been good enough for that job.
yes I would, I have moved from a fixed line with static IP at home to starlink and pangolin has been my life line.
I like having all my own infrastructure where I can manage it, I like to know how things work.
Also have a look at OVH for VPS
I think it's worth it, but you could move to one of the VPS deals on racknerd (or another lowendbox.com deal), for like $10-20 a year and save a bunch.
I don't like the idea of a third party doing MitM type intercepts. I want control over anything that sees my unencrypted data whether it's web services or chat services, etc. So for me the VPS is worth it. But I do also use my VPS for some other services that use apps or other APIs that don't allow for presenting the Pangolin/SSO login step, and aren't too risky to have a bit exposed rather than the responsiveness and battery cost of the separate VPN connection. One day I need to find a better way to handle those but for now it's fine.
Maybe as another option, you could try to find a few other students and pool your money for a shared VPS? Back then I used to share an internet connection with few people to make it more affordable. We also used to share some storage space for stuff and the CS students did a website and an internal message board. I'm old, though. No clue how they do it as of today.
That is a cool idea, but unfortunately, I don't know anyone, that would be willing to do this. One of my friends has a selfhosted server, but he doesn't want to pay for stuff like that. He uses everything through a VPN, so he has no running costs.
I did just come up with a pretty good solution though. I looked into Netbird and they actually have tls-passthrough functionality, so I could just run my nginx-reverse proxy locally which handles the certs and encryption and I could be 100% shure, that the company can't read my traffic.
Yeah install a reverse proxy at home and reach it through a service like Netbird or Tailscale. No VPS needed. And it's probably a better idea to do it this way because a local reverse proxy would be 100% self-reliant. Hosting Pangolin on VPS would always make you dependent on the VPS.
NPM (Nginx Proxy Manager) is an Nginx distribution with a friendly UI and it includes certbot so you can get/renew certs automatically and use https://service.yourdomain.com/ URLs if you want.
You will need a DNS provider for that btw, DeSEC.io is free and committed to privacy.
Totally, though I use towonel on an OVH VPS. Couldn't be happier.
Oh, that's really cool. I also tried that but couldn't get it to work
You can still get a free account with Oracle Cloud
I have that and it's hot garbage.
It's so worth that I did it twice.