> Maybe someone can enlighten me why these services exist and what usecase they have?
Because there are lots of people that can't create their own VPN even though these days you can spin up a lightsail instance for $3.50 pcm and be up and running with Wireguard in minutes.
And for those people that cannot, their threat model changes to now needing to trust a single entity after they are up in minutes.
As you say, those providers have oftentimes been proven to not be so trustworthy. But how many CAs have been shown to be not trustworthy in the last couple years?
Also many websites will block cloud services IPs. This can also happen with 3rd party providers but in my experience it’s much less common because some vpn providers will buy residential IPs.
It also can be nice to get a new IP more or less whenever you want by just connecting to a different, already setup server.
The only websites to block my AWS IP are streaming providers like Netflix.
I don't believe VPN providers are buying residential IPs. They use a p2p architecture and route traffic through their customers, usually without informing them. If I do use a commercial VPN service, I prefer to use the openVPN client rather than their proprietary client.
Because there are lots of people that can't create their own VPN even though these days you can spin up a lightsail instance for $3.50 pcm and be up and running with Wireguard in minutes.
And for those people that cannot, their threat model changes to now needing to trust a single entity after they are up in minutes.
As you say, those providers have oftentimes been proven to not be so trustworthy. But how many CAs have been shown to be not trustworthy in the last couple years?