My router is just a Protectli Vault mini PC with Alpine Linux. You can essentially pick your favorite Linux (or BSD) distro and make it a router.

I want to feel the same but from a purely financial standpoint it makes sense.

Don’t want a locked down phone? Buy directly from the manufacturer.

They’re similar but mainly Tailscale arranges WireGuard tunnels between peers. There are tons of useful features around that functionality like being able to route specific traffic through specific hosts (“nodes” using “app connectors”); it’s even better at finding a way out of hostile networks using relays.

Just as an example I typically use my VPS as an “exit node” so that all my traffic routes through it (which does a ton of tunnel hopping through commercial VPNs) while my wife isn’t into that at all, but both of us have Tailscale on our devices so when either of us accesses Home Assistant it’s routed directly to the host hosting it.

I used to just use a script with cron to update Cloudflare DNS records but these days I don’t screw around with exposing anything to the public internet directly, I just use Tailscale.