DJStarfish

The nature of the Tor network is such that the 'exit ip' will indeed be random, and you have no guarantee of what that will be. It's not a good region unblocker for that reason alone. Also to mention that some services disallow use of Tor because it's also a haven for malicious users and other neer-do-wells, and because Tor exit IPs are constantly changing and shifting around, this thus makes it easier on them to block it outright rather than try and randomly guess which Tor IP is being used by a malicious person.

I'm afraid to say that the real good VPN services are gonna be paid services. You're gonna have to fork over some cash, and most operate on yearly billing (though some may operate on alternate billing terms too). The shadier ones are usually (but NOT always) the free ones. Just watch your step, is my best advice, when picking one to use.

Tons of good extensions for browsers. I use Opera's embedded one and zenmate

Regardless of what it is you do, your isp knows all even if you hide your IP to others you still have to go through your isp to get out to the web so complete anonymity is impossible keep that in mind.