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.…