Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I should have also mentioned that I otherwise thought your initial post was good.

then it’s not bad to also set a VPN killswitch

At least with Mullvad (and I imagine the other three I mentioned), there is nothing to set. It's already there in the app, and automatically enabled after install. The only thing that can be done is to turn it off.

This is what I was referencing in the first bullet about network interface

Understood. I was just providing the specific term ("bind" or "binding"), used by VPN companies & users, for anyone else who wants to search for instructions on properly connecting qBit to their VPN.

I agree that Kape did some sketchy shit in the past

It's not my place to fault or criticize you or anyone else for choosing to go with Kape/PIA (or Nord). I just think people should at least know of their past. For me, there is zero chance of me returning to PIA. Someone tells me the girl I'm interested in cheated on their past boyfriend, or tried to somehow spy on or sabotage him? Zero chance I'm getting involved. Too many other good/better options available. My brother has had no issues dating cheaters. To each their own. None of my business why others make the choices they do.

Any sort of data breach definitely sounds bad but since I haven’t reviewed the details

It's not necessarily that they had a data breach, it's how they handled the situation that many people found troubling.

Nord and PIA you can usually get multiyear deals

Same with this. I don't fault you for trying to save some money. Everyone has their own situation to deal with, and I've been "there" before. For me, I'm not rich or a boomer, but I'm old enough now and have enough disposable income that I make decisions that work for my privacy and reliability requirements. I see something that cheap now and I ask myself, "why is that so cheap?" It could still be a good product, but I know enough to at least ask the question & research. I also don't pay for long term, multi-year deals anymore (I had about six months remaining on my PIA deal when I "noped" out of being a part of Kape's acquisition), but I still try not to be an idiot and just give away money either. As an example, I buy the Mullvad gift card, with a scratch-off code from Amazon, $29/6mo ($4.83/mo) or $57/12mo ($4.75/mo). No euro exchange rate or transactions fees, etc. My preference is to incentivize my favorite companies to stay in business, providing the service and continual upgrades that I want and expect, like the following:

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/we-have-successfully-completed-our-migration-to-ram-only-vpn-infrastructure

-and-

https://mullvad.net/en/blog/moving-our-encrypted-dns-servers-to-run-in-ram

When people talk about "zero logs," I'm not aware of anything better than having everything run through RAM. Going out to lunch/dinner or watching a movie is roughly $10 to $20/person these days. I'll happily pay a couple extra bucks a month for a VPN with this kind of privacy and continual upgrade in service, or from the other three I mentioned (and I believe Mullvad is still even the least expensive of the four). No criticism from me on your choices though.