Is VPN required for home WiFi / internet use?

Tor can be used as a VPN (not recommended for anonymity unless used in conjunction with the Tor Browser). Orbot (Tor VPN) [0] for Android is pretty neat.

ProtonVPN, iVPN, Mullvad are oft suggested on news.yc in no particular order. Lantern.io is another alternative if you're looking to bypass stringent DPI firewalls.

Cloudflare's Warp offers a free tier, too, but is different from traditional VPNs.

Keep this in mind though, most VPNs do not claim to preserve privacy [1], some actively enroach upon it [2]. It is hard to achieve anonymity over rudimentary VPN setups [3].

Also see: https://thatoneprivacysite.net/

[0] https://guardianproject.info/apps/orbot

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19601503

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17889456

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21601031

The point of a VPN when using wifi provided by others is that you do not control the wifi hardware or the wifi environment (i.e., who else it connected to the wifi). Which therefore means you also do not control who else might be listening in on your wifi packets in those environments.

Presuming you have a good password on your home wifi, and are running the better encryption standards, then at home you do control who is connected and what hardware is supplying the service, so you do not have others listening in on your wifi packets (unless you've given those others your wifi passwords).

There is no compelling reason for most people to use a VPN at home.

If you live in a repressive regime that doesn't allow you access to parts of the internet, perhaps you would want to use one. If you're using hotel / coffeeshop wifi, that would be another good use case.