VPN on a Raspberry Pi: Build Your Own VPN Router for the Price of a Pizza

A Raspberry Pi is the cheapest piece of network infrastructure you’ll ever own, and VPN work is one of the things it does best. For the price of a pizza and an evening of setup, a Pi becomes a whole-home VPN gateway, an ad-blocking DNS server, or your personal encrypted door back into your home network from anywhere.

Three different projects hide under “VPN on a Pi.” Here’s what each one is for, and how to pick.

Project 1: the Pi as VPN gateway for your network

The idea: the Pi connects to your commercial VPN provider and shares that tunnel with other devices, acting as a tiny VPN router. Devices that can’t run VPN apps (TVs, consoles, IoT) route through the Pi and inherit the protection, the same goal as our router VPN guide without flashing your actual router.

How it works in practice: install your provider’s Linux client or a WireGuard config on the Pi (NordVPN ships a proper Linux client; Mullvad, Proton and Windscribe publish WireGuard configs), enable IP forwarding, and point chosen devices at the Pi as their gateway, or run the Pi as a second access point. Performance is the planning question: a Pi 4 or Pi 5 pushes WireGuard at speeds that comfortably cover streaming (hundreds of Mbps on a Pi 5); older Pis bottleneck hard and belong on lighter duty.

When this beats a VPN router: you want per-device control (only the TV routes through the Pi, everything else stays normal), your ISP router can’t be flashed, or you enjoy the tinkering. When it doesn’t: whole-home always-on coverage with zero maintenance is better served by a real router running WireGuard, and households without a tinkerer should buy that instead.

Project 2: the Pi as your own VPN server

The reverse direction, and the project most people actually want without knowing its name: WireGuard server software (PiVPN makes the install nearly automatic) on the Pi at home, and your phone or laptop connects back to it from anywhere. You get an encrypted tunnel to your own house: your traffic exits from your home IP, your home services (NAS, Home Assistant, the media server) become reachable securely, and coffee-shop Wi-Fi sees only noise.

What this gives you that commercial VPNs don’t: access to your own network and an exit IP that’s genuinely yours (banks love it; it’s the free version of a dedicated IP). What it doesn’t give you: location changing (you can’t stream another country through your own kitchen), anonymity (the exit is literally your house), or protection from your home ISP’s visibility. The two tools solve different problems, which is why plenty of setups run both.

Requirements worth knowing before the evening starts: a public IP or working NAT traversal (CGNAT connections complicate self-hosting; check before building), a forwarded port on your router, and dynamic DNS if your home IP changes. PiVPN plus a free DDNS service handles all of it with documentation written for first-timers.

Project 3: Pi-hole plus VPN, the power combo

Pi-hole, the Pi’s most famous job, blocks ads and trackers at the DNS level for your whole network. Combined with either project above, it stacks: run Pi-hole alongside the WireGuard server and your phone abroad gets home’s ad blocking through the tunnel; run it alongside the gateway setup and the TV gets a commercial VPN plus network-level ad blocking at once, a homemade version of the provider blockers like NordVPN’s Threat Protection, with more control and more maintenance.

This combination is the actual endgame of most Pi networking journeys, and it’s worth planning for even if you start with one project: a Pi 4 or 5 runs both loads without strain.

Honest accounting: DIY versus subscription

The Pi projects replace different slices of a commercial VPN. They fully replace it for secure remote access to home and for trusted exit identity. They don’t touch the jobs that need someone else’s servers: geo-shifting to other countries, IP anonymity in a crowd, and no-logs jurisdiction games, which remain subscription territory. Cost-wise the Pi wins on electricity-only operation, and loses on your hours: initial setup is an evening, and updates, certificate hygiene and the occasional SD-card funeral are yours forever.

The setups compose cleanly, which is the real answer: a commercial provider for the world-facing jobs (NordVPN’s Linux client runs happily on the same Pi: get it here), and your own WireGuard door for the home-facing ones.

The build list and first steps

Hardware: Pi 4 or 5 (2GB is plenty), decent SD card or USB SSD, Ethernet to the router (Wi-Fi works; wires sleep better). Software path for the server project: install PiVPN with its one-line installer, choose WireGuard, add a DDNS hostname, generate a profile per device, scan the QR with the WireGuard app. Software path for the gateway project: provider’s Linux client or WireGuard config, enable forwarding, set the routing or access point. Either way, finish like every project on this site: a leak test from a client device, once, to confirm the tunnel does what the diagram promised.

Maintenance: what owning the projects costs

The honest line items, annualized. System updates: a monthly apt upgrade and the occasional PiVPN update, ten minutes with coffee. Certificate and key hygiene: WireGuard’s keys don’t expire, but revoking a lost phone’s profile takes one command, worth practicing before you need it. The SD-card reality: cards die; back up the config directory once after setup (one tar command) and a dead card becomes a twenty-minute restore instead of a rebuild. And the IP watch: if your ISP changes your home address often, the DDNS client is the component to monitor, since every remote connection depends on it resolving correctly.

Total honest burden: an hour or two per year after the build evening, which is the price of owning infrastructure instead of renting it. Households that find that price wrong should buy the commercial-only setup with zero shame; this page exists for the ones who find it fun.

(Pi hardware moves fast; the project pattern doesn’t. Whatever board generation you’re holding, the gateway, server and Pi-hole trio above maps onto it, with throughput as the only spec worth rechecking against your line speed.)

Few purchases teach more networking per dollar; the VPN projects are simply the most immediately useful chapter of the curriculum.

(Community resources carry what this overview can’t: PiVPN’s docs, the OpenWrt wiki and the provider Linux guides are the canonical references when a step drifts from any article’s snapshot.)

Gift idea footnote, sincerely: a Pi with PiVPN preconfigured is the rare present that teaches the recipient networking while solving their hotel-Wi-Fi problem. The documentation does the support calls for you.

Want to compare all VPNs side by side? Check our full VPN comparison table with scores across 18 criteria.