[UnoriginalGuy]

If you set up the VPN yourself they can be both cheap and relatively secure/private (e.g. EC2, Linode, etc).

I'm not sure how much I'd be willing to trust people selling anonymous VPN services. Many of them are located in untouchable countries and knowingly provide services which violate various laws (e.g. one I used to subscribe to had a specific tab for copyright notices).

If you dig down into who operates many of them you come up quite empty handed. No address, no name, just a few more shell companies and then a dead-end.

HTTPS certainly makes you more secure while using them, however you leak a lot of information in general as a lot of stuff is still HTTP. You trivially build a full picture of someone (name, literal picture, DoB, et al) over a week of watching their insecure web-traffic.

Plus if you're depending on HTTPS then what is even the point of an anonymous VPN? Might have well just use the dumb WiFi and assume that everything HTTP is world-visible.