I use VPN's for work every day and for that it is well worth the overhead.
I would only consider free to use VPN for my laptop accessing open wifi - even then I would not want to use open wifi for anything business - or dealing with secure logon access. I would say commercial VPN would be my only real choice.

Most folks think VPN solves lots of security issues; nope - it pushes the security issue from the local ISP to the remote VPN servers.


Now if I had my own VPN setup between my remote laptop and a specific server at home; now that would provide a good layer of security. I have seen folks use this to tunnel in from point A to point B so they could watch a blocked site like YouTube.