So I was just renewing a contract with a VPN provider, and paid out for a couple years it works out to somewhere under $2/month.

ISPs around me can run from about $50-$150/month

If I'm putting the major bulk of my traffic over a tunnel that could eat up a sizable chunk of a given connection point for the provider that I'm sure costs more than $2/month to maintain. I would have to assume it would take the combined subscriptions of several users to pay for a given node.

So how does that work as a business model? Unless these VPN providers are getting a steal on their connections it's hard to envision how they can manage to pay their costs without these nodes being absolutely bottlenecked when a few people start streaming some shows.