Ideas for whole home VPN? Router vs virtual router?

I have Google Wifi in my home, which I know there are plenty of reasons to complain about, but it “just works” and I would prefer not to change it. However, as you know, it does not allow for VPN to be installed on-router. With this in mind, what are my options to enable whole home VPN? I do not really want to buy a high end router to run the VPN if I don’t have to, because I already have the Google Wifi all over my house as my wifi distributor. However, it appears most routers do not allow much bandwidth when running the VPN. Obviously, I want to limit how much I restrict my bandwidth. So, I’m wondering what would be a a good router to choose for this. Or, would I be better to use a Raspberry Pi, PC, or some other method?

You can setup a VPN server with a pi, or a nas running docker. I run mine via my Firewalla router which I LOVE - can send individual devices through the vpn with a single click for client access and log back in via vpn server easily as well.

What is your goal for ‘whole home vpn?’ Do you really need/want ALL your traffic going through a vpn?

I use PFSense. It’s running on an older computer I got for free and PFSense is free. I had to buy a $20 NIC. So essentially I’ve made a high end router with $20. I’ve never had an issues with reliability but this may be a steep learning curve for some. This gives you many options in VPN configuration and way more than the average home user will need in networking.

I use a Unifi AP, but I’m sure you can turn off the router part of the Google wifi, although I have no experience with them.

I don’t know if I would recommended it for the average person, but if you have some experience in networking, it’s easy to get up and running.

Are you asking about forcing all of your home traffic over a VPN to a VPN service or are you asking about a VPN to allow you to securely access your home network remotely?

If you’re talking about remote access, there’s several options.

If you’re talking about forcing traffic to a VPN service, what’s the end goal? Typically VPN services just move the endpoint of where your traffic comes out so while it may protect your data from your ISP it utimately makes that traffic available to the VPN service instead. If you’re looking to change the geolocation of traffic (i.e. to stream content that’s not available in your region) then this might work fine. If your goal is increased privacy, you have to ask yourself if you trust your VPN service provider with your data any more than you trust your ISP with it. Finally, never trust any free vpn service. If they’re not charging you, you’re not their customer, you’re their product and someone is buying info about your traffic. The VPN service has to make money from someone. This is the same reason Facebook is free.

A $50-60 Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X provides 10x more power than it should at the price. Put it before your Google stuff, convert the Google to AP mode (hopefully you can) and let the ER-X handle everything else, including VPN to the internet. You’ll need to do your research on it, but it’s by far the best home network investment I’ve ever made.

Get a Raspberry Pi and install Linux and a VPN client on it, then make it the gateway for all the devices on your network.

Plus one for RPi4, w/ PiVPN and Wireguard for ingress VPN. Share the questioning about egress VPN.

Same situation, i have a eero and want to direct all traffic to a VPN service to mainly just stream content not available in my region, wha hardware can should i buy to be able to configure such?