Hi! You can often pay with crypto, and this is usually well enough for anonymity. I’d be concerned paying with a credit card, but many do that.
I use a VPN even with a seedbox, especially when connecting to them to retrieve the files, but for their own anonymity, they don’t care. They’re usually in jurisdictions where it’s harder and not worth it for companies to try to sue them.
I use seedit4me, but I haven’t tried any other. I’m pretty satisfied with them for the past 3 or 4 years. You can look at their different offerings and get something within your budget. I felt like there’s a bit of a learning curve in the beginning, but if you already know the *arr stack, you’ll be well ahead of me when I started!
I hope my answers helped a little. The others’ answers will likely have more information.
Have fun!
With sftp/ftps, it’s true that they don’t know what you’re copying, but the metadata contains the ip address and the file size, so if someone’s specifically interested in trying to get you, then it’s easy for them to guess what you’re doing. That’s why we’re all torrenting Linux ISOs and AI models.
But that’s just my take on it, most don’t use a vpn when using seedboxes.