I'm running a 3 day trial of NordVPN right now. The good thing is I've found the source of my buffering frustrations for certain streams, AT&T throttling.
My problem is I'd like a VPN solution that only runs on specific apps. I don't see any options for this with Nord. I'm running a Shield TV.
Thank you for your suggestions.
I have been using Private Internet Access for nearly 4 years and cannot recommend it enough. They recently released an AndroidTV compatible version that works as seemlessly as their mobile and desktop apps. I have the service running 24/7 for 2 years on my Linux based Plex, Deluge, Radarr, and Sonarr server and it has had basically 100% uptime with no speed throttling on my 100mbps connection.
ExpressVPN has a feature called split-tunneling but so far only works on Win/Mac though. It routes only selected apps through the VPN, the rest still goes through the regular network.
I use OpenVPN for Android TV with a premium subscription of IPVanish. I'm really really happy. You can exclude/include everything you want and it works in the background. Supports sleep/wake up too!
I have PureVPN and I am very happy with it. I bought the 2Years Plan with the code: 2Y15Extra you become 15% extra so it only costs 50.80USD.
I know shadowsocks does that. When I was in China my friend used it. It has a functionality to allow you to choose the proxy mode, namely "Auto PAC" and "Global". PAC means that for some websites it doesn't use the proxy (in my case the Chinese-accesible websites), while for others it uses the VPN (in my case it's Google-related). Global means to redirect all traffic. You can customize the PAC profiles to manually disable VPN for certain websites.
e.g. I don't need the proxy when I'm using Twitter so I use the "whitelist" option and I add twitter.com to it. Alternatively, I can use the blacklist and I put all the websites that I want to use VPN for in it except Twitter.
There are several apps that allow you to connect to a ShadowSocks server. IIRC Surge, Potatso, Wingy all do that, and there're even some free ones. If you can find the Github page for ShadowSocks, there're also client apps for Windows, Mac and android as well. The whole process is a bit complicated, but it does have the functionality you mentioned and a few other things as well alongside.
You can try hide.me vpn every month you get free 2gb of vpn data
This, hands down: https://stacksocial.com/sales/windscribe-vpn . I've been using it for years.
They also have a US based Windflix VPN. You'll know what it is if you need it. And they don't limit device connections so long as you're not connecting to a single account from dozens of IPs. And... my MiBox gets about 70mbps on it, but tops was something like 500mbps.
There is literally no better value for money on the market. But it's also a bit pyramidey with the lifetime subscriptions being so cheap. So long as you're comfortable with that, it's just the best.
P.S. If you want to stick with Nord and only tunnel specific apps, install the OpenVPN Android TV app that's on the app store. You'll need to load it up with .ovpn files from your provider.
Specific apps capability is something very rare.
Actually, not plenty of VPN services does allow you the functionality you are talking about. However, you can attempt to configure "StrongSwan" to connect to a VPN server. NordVPN even has a tutorial for that https://nordvpn.com/tutorials/android/ikev2/ And the StrongSwan app does allow you to exclude applications from the VPN tunnel. Hope this helps you.