Joined ExpressVPN today and ads galore everywhere. I use Pihole for my home network and obviously ExpressVPN bypasses everything and it doesn’t have built in even basic ad protection.
I was using Nord before and they are okay at blocking ads but ExpressVPN seem really bad at this.
any suggestions?
The only way around this is to use their manual setup.
Set up the your Pi as a VPN client. Use ExpressVPN’s manual configuration to create a VPN connection. Tell the Pi to use the Pihole as the DNS server.
It’s a hack but it works. You won’t get all the locations that Express offers in their app, or even their new protocol (there is no Wireguard). But it’s the only way to get the best of both worlds.
A VPN is not a adblocking service. I would rather the VPN is secure and fast not blocking content. Use Ublock, Ghostery, or get a list from ipblocklist that blocks ads.
I won’t, and you can give it a try, but that will not work 
It will only block their main website domain.
Their DNS servers run on the same IP as the VPN server. Which means that the DNS queries are made in the VPN tunnel. So, to block their DNS, you’ll need to block their VPN.