When the Internet was blocked in Kazakhstan popular VPNs got blocked.
Is there any reason to pay for them?
What are the better alternatives?

What popular VPNs got blocked?

If you have the technical ability, a self-made VPN has the potential to be more resistant to blocking. There are a few reasons for this. One is that if only a few people use it, the IP address is less conspicuous. Another is that commercial VPNs are not always designed for circumvention, and therefore may not use covert protocols.

A good place to start with setting up your own VPN is Outline.

Hey Tango. Thanks for your reply. Surfshark (mine) as well as literally everything else got blocked.

Proper major VPN providers use customized obfuscated protocols and setup special servers for filtered regions like Kazakstan.

If your government detect and block VPN/proxies by protocols, there are probably aren’t. If not (if it just block VPN providers’ IP addresses/servers, not the protocols) then you can setup your own private VPN/proxy server.

Are you talking about during the shutdown from January 5 to January 11? I thought that it was almost everything blocked at that time, nothing targeted towards VPNs specifically. In that situation, a homemade VPN and a commercial VPN will be equally ineffective. There were only a few things that worked at that time, but none of them is part of any common VPN protocol: Уроки, вынесенные из отключения интернета в Казахстане в январе 2022 года для обхода цензуры.