Remember to come back next year for our annual closing down sale... /s

Supposedly they're restructuring to serve all US orders from US warehouses and local suppliers. Not sure how well that'll work, but ok.

I don't play a ton of mobile games, but the ones I have tried: the ads just fail to load. Most games even treat it like the ad was watched and give you whatever reward was behind the ad view.

Yes, not even inside games.

When we're out of the house like during vacations, the kid will automatically warn me when I forget to turn on the VPN because of the ads he gets.

Only trash ones have ads inside

That's why I prefer pihole over things like nextdns; it's quick and easy to modify filters to allow things through and fix specific blockages that shouldn't be there. Or just disable the blocking altogether to be automatically reenabled shortly after.

I'd rather take the occasional 30sec to bypass the blocking now and again vs seeing ads on every possible digital surface.

It's been well over a year since I had to do even that.