My family VPN somehow turned into a free VPN for 400 strangers

I set up a WireGuard box on a spare mini PC for my parents and a few friends. After I dropped the configs in a local Telegram group, it grew to 60 people on one CPU core with no per-device isolation, and I could see everyone's traffic.

I rebuilt it on real VPSes with WireGuard, Outline and Xray depending on who needed what, and ran BeAdmin across the servers instead of hand-rolling configs for every protocol. Now it's 3 servers, about 400 peers and multi-hop between two countries, all still free. Bandwidth isn't the hardest part. It's that a 20-minute outage now means someone's mom can't reach them, and that got me serious about backups fast.