Opened the comments to put in a recommendation for NextDNS. The free plan allows 300k DNS queries and is more than enough for me across three devices (Mac/iPhone/iPad).

I have not needed an ad-blocker for the past 2 years and hardly see any websites breaking. Often syndicate links break, which is not a big deal for me.

+100 for NextDNS. Happy paying customer here.

Aside from it just working, their mobile client is a fantastic thing. When I am off wifi, my phone routes DNS to NextDNS and I get the same adblocking when I am on cellular data.

Me too, my Android / Samsung phone has a "Private DNS"[1] setting where I specify my NextDNS instead of using their mobile app.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28365321

For those who prefer Pi-Hole, I set up a VPN server on my PfSense so my devices can use the DNS server in my home network when I'm out. The fact that traffic is encrypted is a nice bonus.

I do this on a symmetrical 500Mbit fiber line, YMMV.

Sounds good, are they selling your queries?

Don't think they are, but if you're after privacy, of course it isn't strictly better than self-hosting AdGuard Home or Pi-Hole.

As one ex, not me but some may be uncomfortable with their use of BigCloud (AWS/GCP/Cloudflare) infrastructure.

Nextdns here too!

I gave pihole a shot but an update went wrong and I had to muck around getting it to work again (it was also my dhcp, so was a pain whilst working from home!)

Back to nextdns and it’s smooth. I have different profiles set up - a home one (for everything that can’t take DoH, including my work laptop), one for my son (his iPad), one for my wife (no logging, minimal ad blocking, allowing Facebook) and one for my devices (lots of different blockers).

It also works outside of my network too.

I pay the £17/year as I feel allo of this is worth supporting.

I used it at home and liked it... for 10 days, after which it stopped working because I'd hit some limit. For 1 computer, 1 Amazon TV stick, and 1 phone that I barely use, 10 days max is pretty bad.

So I uninstalled it and went with adguard, which doesn't arbitrarily stop working.

> because I'd hit some limit (..) 10 days max is pretty bad

The free(!) plan includes 300,000 queries per month. That is transparent everywhere. On the website, pricing page and in the dashboard. You can even see how much you have already used. That's pretty fair for a free service for which you pay nothing. For me, that's enough for a whole month.

> (..) which doesn't arbitrarily stop working

1. NextDNS sends an email before the limit is reached

2. Once the limit is reached, no more ads are blocked, but dns continues to work

Hey if it works for you, great. It didn't work for me. 10 days casual use for 1 person and then "pay me" is not a positive experience, so I found another solution.

How many days should a paid service give you free casual use for a positive experience?

You are using a consumable (CPU & data transfer, along with your desired amount of analytics data storage) that they pay for, and, shockingly, they are not ad supported.

What? It’s a paid for service.

I currently use a pi-hole. In a home of 2, we have 74k queries per day. That would effectively be a 4 day trial... so I can understand the other person's frustration.

The only feature NextDNS is missing that I’d love (and am tempted to switch to Pi-Hole / Adguard to get) is Custom DNS records. I really don’t wana run my own DNS Server forwarding to NextDNS just to do this.

Edit: I just discovered this is a thing “Settings > Rewrite”

Hapoy hapoy jpy jpy

It's good but unfortunately their Windows and Linux clients are fairly buggy.