However you can't use it on the phone while not at home (aside from using vpn/wireguard), but nextdns allows it.

As for the latency - is it really noticeable?

Latency isn't the important measurement — it's the actual time to resolve. This will be significantly longer than the ping latency.

Unbound, recommended for use with Pi-hole, can be configured to log this by enabling "log-replies" in unbound.conf⁽¹⁾ where the time to resolve will be logged in seconds.

⁽¹⁾ https://docs.pi-hole.net/guides/dns/unbound/ ⁽²⁾ https://unbound.docs.nlnetlabs.nl/en/latest/manpages/unbound...

my biggest gripe with NextDNS is not having an ability to add custom blocklists. I'd gladly pay for it even if there was a paid tier with this feature.

It seems you can add domains to the deny list via their api: https://nextdns.github.io/api/#profiles

So atleast there's that.

I'm aware of adding domains one by one, but I want to add some lists like Hagezi Threat Intelligence Feed which is not available in the blocklists, and these blocklists have >500k domain list.

I'm currently using Blocky as my DNS resolver. It works fine and is super fast because of the fine control over caching, but I'm disappointed with its memory footprint. 400MB for a total blocklist of 1.3M domains

dns latency is the single biggest reason people think their internet is slow imho

I'm currently seeing 12ms latency to my upstream NextDNS server. On my home network I "proxy" it with a forwarding/caching DNS server on my router, so for "the usual suspects", latency is not an issue.

On the go, over 5G, those 12ms won't make much of a difference.

Considering that people deploy PiHole on Raspberry Pi W models, over wifi, you won't lose much running NextDNS, but you gain dns blacklisting on all networks, as opposed to just your home network (or via VPN)

I'm not sure how that could be. Even if it's your first ever request to the host, the latency is a one time thing and then it's cached. Even an extra 100ms for DNS latency is going to be unnoticeable compared to an empty browser cache and having to download a bunch of images

Define latency ?

This is my latency (ping.nextdns.io):

  zepto-cph (IPv6)    12 ms  (anycast1, ultralow2)

  zepto-cph           13 ms  (anycast1, ultralow2)

■ anexia-cph 13 ms (anycast2, ultralow1)

  anexia-cph (IPv6)   15 ms  (anycast2, ultralow1)

welp. for every single domain you interact with, you gotta do a dns lookup. visit a modern website like yahoo, cnn, wapo, whatever and that will be like 100 dns requests. your device hits your router, if it has no answer, it recursively goes up the line getting an answer. do that 100 times. that is just for resolution. you still gotta actually hit that endpoint and get whatever it is you are trying to get.

so if your dns is slow, there is a tremendous amount of latency added to virtually everything that you do. just because you can hit nextdns in 12ms does not mean the e2e duration for a single dns-then-fetch is going to be in the realm of 12ms. if nextdns doesn't have the answer it needs to go find it.

I use my local router as a DNS cache/proxy for this exact reason, though i doubt 12ms (or 24ms) will mean much in the grand scheme of things compared to downloading a 25MB webpage which is mostly tracking code and ads.

Yes, if we were in the "good old days" of slim websites, 12ms may be noticable, but today, with webpages taking up lots and lots of storage that is served with every connetion, i seriously doubt you'll notice.

Besides that, every browser and modern operating system will cache DNS records for whatever the TTL from the upstream DNS is set to.