15 years ago, I was using EC2 at work, and realized it was surprisingly easy to SSH into it in a way where all my traffic went through EC2. I could watch local Netflix when traveling. It was a de facto VPN.
Details are not at the top of my mind these years later, but you can probably rig something up yourself that looks like regular web dev shit and not a known commercial VPN. I think there was a preference in Firefox or something.
The issue these days is that all of the EC2 IP ranges are well known, and are usually not very high-reputation IPs, so a lot of services will block them, or at least aggressively require CAPTCHAs to prevent botting.
Source: used to work for a shady SEO company that searched Google 6,000,000 times a day on a huge farm of IPs from every provider we could find
I watched a season of Doctor Who that way back when the BBC were being precious about it. But Digital Ocean, so $5.