Btw, a Tor relay can be relatively lightweight. I run one on a $5/mo VPS (which does many other things). You need 1 GiB of RAM, but a single basic CPU core largely suffices. My relay sends/receives ~150 GiB of traffic per day (~15 Mbits/s). It’s not an exit node, so no legal worries.

Here’s my torrc:

  SocksPort  0
  ExitRelay  0

  ORPort     NNNN
  DirPort    NNNN

  Nickname     X
  ContactInfo  X@X.com

  RelayBandwidthRate    80 megabits
  RelayBandwidthBurst  120 megabits

  MaxMemInQueues  384 megabytes

  AvoidDiskWrites  1
  HardwareAccel    1
  NoExec           1
  NumCPUs          1

Here’s my override config for systemd (Ubuntu 24.04):

  $ sudo systemctl edit tor@default
  [Service]
  Nice=15
  CPUAffinity=0
  CPUWeight=60
  StartupCPUWeight=6
  IOWeight=60
  TimerSlackNSec=100us

  MemoryMax=896M
  MemoryHigh=800M
  OOMScoreAdjust=1000

  LimitAS=2G
  LimitNPROC=512
  LimitNOFILE=10240

  PrivateDevices=true
  ProtectSystem=true
  ProtectHome=true