Use someone else's wifi.

I used to park my car in a Home Depot parking lot when I went to work with a laptop torrenting until the battery died.

Go to the small local library, they usually have free wifi, sometimes without registration and if you're lucky they don't filter any traffic.

There is also a map of open wifi hotspots online which work without registration also, but I'm too lazy to dig out the link.

Ask online for somebody to share their VPN. Many subscriptions explicitly allow inviting friends and family and allow multiple simultaneous connections.

There’s a few free vpn providers out there. You could do a little homework and see if they are a good option. I tend to mistrust free services like that (if I’m not paying, who is, and what are they paying for?), but if you’re in a pinch it’s something to research.

Another option is to look for deals. Sometimes VPN providers will have a super sale a few times a year. I think once I got a NordVPN subscription for THREE YEARS for like $60. It’s more expensive than a single month of anything, yes, but if you can afford a onetime expense it’s nice not to have to worry about a recurring monthly cost.

Your other option is to not use torrents. Usenet is still the grand daddy of file sharing and is pretty much anonymous. Most Usenet hosts are paid, but back in the day even ISPs ran their own servers. It could be worth looking and seeing if there’s any free or low cost providers there.

You can get into private trackers and trust them. Not recommended, but some do.

Generally speaking, the copyright trolls only target public trackers and DHT. There have been some instances of them making way into TL and others. Your ISP could also identify torrenting on private trackers if they wanted to, even with mitigations. In my experience and from what I hear, most ISPs do not go to these lengths.

So, there a risk doing the above. Whether or not it's worth it until you can afford a decent VPN is up to you.

Aside: Please do not use a free VPN for torrenting (or tor, for that matter). They are either like RiseUp and run on donations for people who really, really need them, or Proton which is commercial and specifically try to block or slow down the traffic. Either way, if ruins it for everyone else.

Without passing any moral judgement on you whatsoever, if you posted this without a VPN, your post is permanently tied to your IP address and thus your home and is evidence of your intent to commit a crime, even if you said it's "for research". I wouldn't do that again and now I'm worried for you in general if you weren't worried to post this.

Generally nobody can afford to lose their privacy. It's $1/device/month per person if you get 5 other people to share a Mullvad account and you shouldn't do it because you're trying to pirate. A VPN is not a tool for piracy. You should be conducting all internet activity in it unless you do not care about the government seeing it.

An alternative that hasn't been presented yet.

Why not use less well known foreign public trackers? Rutracker has a stupid amount of content, including a lot of niche music content.

If you are worried about Rutracker being too well known, you can try Mazepa Torrent. This is only relevant for movies and shows. Their collection isn't as good as rutracker, but they have most new releases. While the default audio language is Ukrainian, English is always included (this would an issue for non-English language movies/shows, but English subtitles are usually included).

Move down under to New Zealand - although we do have a 3 strikes law, the clament has to pay all fees upfront to thr ISP and get a court order first...

We mostly raw dog it down here

I scrolled through the comments and didn't see anybody mention this... You know at least one VPN has a free tier, right? I tried proton's free tier and liked it so much I became a customer. I know posts from their CEO have recently became controversial around here, but it's hard to argue with free.

protonvpn.com/pricing

Pricing

Choose a plan that works for you and defend your privacy with a security-focused VPN.

^Proton

I mean you can avoid all that. If you're just interested in music and retro games then just use soulseek and use the rom megathread. both of which are going to be either peer to peer or direct downloads. no torrenting.

Rom megathread (web search it) has quite literally everything. no need to search, no need to torrent, it's all right there. And soulseek with Nicotine+ just works like napster. sign up, be sure to share your music library, and then have at it.

I would suggest don't.

For downloading, look at DDL sites.

For uploading, if you can't do it safely, don't. Stash it all, make backups, keep it until you can do it safely.

See if Tribler works or fuck it and download anyway.

I’ve been wanting to get into torrenting for a while

Just do it.

I been using torrents since they became a good option a little over twenty years ago. I’ve torrented using public and all manner of private trackers both with and without vpn or tor.

I have received letters from various ISPs during those years. Here’s what it all boils down to:

What’s most important: turn off peer exchange and dht, turn on require encryption.

What’s also important: only use private trackers.

What’s less important, but good to have: use a vpn with port forwarding with your client bound to its interface. It doesn’t matter if you don’t bind the client to the vpn interface so make sure you do that.

E: just read through the comments on your native instance that don’t show up to me normally. There’s some old misinformation going around still. I’m not gonna argue or go into great detail but things like only leeching, only using foreign trackers or using someone else’s WiFi don’t do anything to help you avoid some kind of letter.

Doesn't Proton have a free VPN tier? I think it doesn't support port forwarding so your connections would be limited, but that might still work?

Otherwise, check the megathread and go with direct downloads. Those happen over https so completely encrypted.