Just a no name knockoff killawatt meter, I think it was $10-15

My desktop Jellyfin/aarr stack and nextcloud server runs about 1.2kwh/day. So not bad but not free

I use PIA because it’s cheap as dirt. I don’t use their client and I have it setup so exclusively my torrent client uses it. It works for my use case because I’m pretty much just trying to avoid nasty letters from my ISP. I wouldn’t trust them with any of my regular traffic because they’re sketchy and there’s got to be a reason they’re so cheap.

Although I would consider what your usecase for a VPN is - ie what attack vectors are you trying to protect against when using it for regular traffic? There’s arguably very little a VPN does to protect you on public WiFi and also opens you up to new risks

Shouldn’t need one if you trust your seedbox provider to not log. And even if you don’t trust them you’d need to find a VPN to trust more and they’re almost all super sketchy.