pfSense No More Without Paid Version?

[Tech9]

The choice is yours. pfSense Plus for 139/year or YouTube Premium for 168/year. pfSence CE or YouTube with ads. Or you can spend the time looking for free alternatives. When they become more popular and paid - you'll have to do it again. Remember TeamViewer and AnyDesk? This is what is going to happen to free alternatives sooner or later. And you'll continue buying newer models iPhone, Pixel or Galaxy for $1000 without thinking too much because the alternatives are not as good.

 

[GHammer]

The choice is yours. pfSense Plus for 139/year or YouTube Premium for 168/year. pfSence CE or YouTube with ads. Or you can spend the time looking for free alternatives. When they become more popular and paid - you'll have to do it again. Remember TeamViewer and AnyDesk? This is what is going to happen to free alternatives sooner or later. And you'll continue buying newer models iPhone, Pixel or Galaxy for $1000 without thinking too much because the alternatives are not as good.

Indeed, the choice is mine.
Hmmm, I don't use YouTube enough to care about ads.
Plus, my point is not wether I need to pay or not. It is the trustworthiness of who I choose to pay.
For me, I'll not give a nickel for pfSense after this move.
I'm a good consumer, I spend on odd things.
I don't spend much on software. When I do, I like some amount of certainty.
Cars, espresso machines, audio equipment? I'm a sucker for shiny new things!

At the end of the day, this is not something I need to run a business, make money, stay alive. If I spend time on it, I'm not at the dog track.

 

[Tech9]

I'm a sucker for shiny new things!

Your shiny new things have a brand name you know and trust, but inside large % internals are Made in China. Including in your car. You complain about $139/year and apply your trustworthiness principles and at the same time you allowed someone to scam you with $10.000 or more.

 

[GHammer]

Your shiny new things have a brand name you know and trust, but inside large % internals are Made in China. Including in your car. You complain about $139/year and apply your trustworthiness principles and at the same time you allowed someone to scam you with $10.000 or more.

Hmmm, first you know nothing about anything I own.
Secondly, made in China means I'm getting things built by people who know how to do it.
Not a whole lots of tech is built outside China.
If you don't manufacture things, you don't know how to design them well.
Well, there's the whole being dependent on the kindness of strangers thing in an emergency. But the wizards of Wall St have spoken and nobody in the West is going to make much of anything.
Enjoy your RCA tube TV.

 

[Tech9]

Hmmm, first you know nothing about anything I own.

I know one thing - if you can show it to other people money is not a problem. If it's somewhere there hidden - why pay for it? I don't need to know you. I see what's happening around every day. Brand names everywhere on credit card. Don't take it personally. $139/year is $0.38/day. I'm sure your coffee in your shiny espresso machine is more than that per cup. Time to think about alternatives perhaps.

I'm getting things built by people who know how to do it

You're getting things from people paid 1/10 or less to do it for your favorite brand name. It's called outsourcing. You still pay full price, the brand cashes the difference. The result is a shiny thing that lasts less than before and you need to get another sooner. The brand is waiting for you.

 

[Christos]

Netgate asks businesses to pay $400/y that is as good as free if a company buys a server that costs $30.000 and use it on datacenter and offices.

Then asks lab users for $139/y per device but labs have more than one routers (virtual of physical) to test things out. They could give a trial period or permission to use a licence on more than one devices.

And finally, they ask for home users to pay $139/y while the free CE version is more than enough for home use. Only a small percentage will pay and netgate will loose money.

A company has to have a good pricing policy, not only good products.

 

[Tech9]

The pricing I see is 129, 399, 799 based on support options. Home use CE is 0 and as you said more than enough. I may need to revert one of my units to CE because it's going EoL (5100), not sure yet now it works. I understand people get upset when something free is taken away, but the real question here - how much is your time worth? Plus to CE is perhaps 1h time. Plus to keeping Plus - 5min time and less than a coffee a day. Plus to alternatives may take a week of exploring and reconfiguring. Bare Linux may take a month or longer depending on what knowledge you start from. It's money vs time choice.

 

[eightiescalling]

There's another question I haven't seen surfaced on this thread.

Do I like high quality freebies? Sure. But if its something that needs to be high quality and have along life my next question tends to be how does that business sustain itself and the freebie?

You can get in to discussions about free or not, owned vs subscription or even whether company pivots it's product strategy so often you get dizzy but without a sustainable business model, it's game over anyway.

If the product does what you want, a bit of certainty it will keep going - which this change appears to re-enforce even if not the best news - is wanted. Part of my reason for Asus and Merlin gear is I know it, have been comfortably using it for a long time and don't need to go through a new learning curve. If I was to swap to pfSense I'd want the same thing.

 

[Christos]

It's money vs time choice.

It's more than that. It is buying something (an alternative) vs paying subscription forever.

 

[Christos]

how does that business sustain itself and the freebie?

without a sustainable business model, it's game over anyway.

For me personally, the best business model is give me something that is 80% stable and free to test it at home, then learn from my experience and sell it to big companies 100% stable to pay your bills. VyOS and Redhat does that.

 

[eightiescalling]

For me personally, the best business model is give me something that is 80% stable and free to test it at home, then learn from my experience and sell it to big companies 100% stable to pay your bills. VyOS and Redhat does that.

That's certainly one option - the question is what ratio of feedback from people with solid knowledge that contributes to the extra 20% vs overhead support and filtering through feedback of countless bitty home networks (or home lab - either way, a far cry from a corporate setup) and people that don't know things as well as they think.

 

[sfx2000]

I would think a high clock rate would be in order for single threaded PPPoE in a router. Something like the Intel i3 6100T gen 6 for low power draw which is what I use. I don't know if your motherboard will support this CPU or not. There are some i7 low power CPUs out there also that cost more if you need the extra power.

Clock Speeds are life with SW routing...

SMT/HyperThreading - normally I would disable this, as this keeps cores from being over-committed...

Intel Core I5-10400 is in a nice place, as it's PCIe 3.0 and fairly fast DDR4-2666 - it's a 65W TDP processor...

6 physical cores are more than enough, 2.9GHz with turbo up to 4.3GHz...

 

[Tech9]

For me personally, the best business model is give me something that is 80% stable and free to test it at home, then learn from my experience and sell it to big companies 100% stable to pay your bills. VyOS and Redhat does that.

Then you're going to complain they collect your data. This is what TrendMicro is doing with their services in Asuswrt. Millions of home users help them to improve their commercial services. Get an Asus router and your wish will come true. Doesn't work with Netgate at the moment.

 

[sfx2000]

It's been a few interesting views...

Let me share somethng - the first exposure I had to pfSense was a blog entry from a senior software engineer at Netflix, working on Site Reliability...

At the time, pfSense was a BSD distro you could download and put on to a Compact Flash card on a basic X86 device, and have a set of granular control over your LAN - a set of capabilites far beyond the home gateways at the time...

Stop and think about this - here's an engineer at a major content provider that needs to scale smartly - and he chose pfSense...

I get that Netgate is not a charity - and most home WLAN hobbyists - giving them a free license is not a bad thing... it used to be an investment for those downstream opportunities...Because - some day - that guy is going to have that job where the big licenses come into play...

Where things got weird with Netgate and pfSense is when they started selling their own HW - and here is where the present struggle is - they need to protect their business selling HW, hence the pfSense Gold and subsequently the pfSense Plus licenseing...

 

[Tech9]

I prefer tested and guaranteed to work hardware. Netgate appliances I need are under $1000. Switches are much more expensive. Servers are much more expensive than switches. Netgate hardware is actually second cheapest part of the networks after APs. I have nothing to complain about. The home appliance going EoL will be switched to CE if needed and life goes on the same way.

 

[Christos]

Stop and think about this - here's an engineer at a major content provider that needs to scale smartly - and he chose pfSense...

Cisco uses linux on their routers, correct? Why don't they use BSD? I'm asking because it's something I'm challenging in my mind, linux vs BSD for routers.

 

[glens]

Two good tools to choose from is what it boils down to.

 

[Tech9]

Possible alternatives:

Sophos Firewall (home edition)

Cybersecurity as a Service Delivered | Sophos

We Deliver Superior Cybersecurity Outcomes for Real-World Organizations Worldwide with a Broad Portfolio of Advanced Security Products and Services.

www.sophos.com

Just check in forums if your hardware is supported.

NG Firewall (Untangle, now Arista)

NG Firewall at Home | Edge Threat Management - Arista

Run NG Firewall at Home

edge.arista.com

Home Protect Basic plan is $50/year, 30-day free trial.

Both have nice and easy to use UI.

 

[sfx2000]

Cisco uses linux on their routers, correct? Why don't they use BSD? I'm asking because it's something I'm challenging in my mind, linux vs BSD for routers.

It's 6 of one, half-dozen of another - JunOS is BSD based for example...

There are upsides for both approaches - basing on Linux leverages into all of the contributions by others, and Linux is where much of the bleeding edge networking development is done...

BSD has it's advantages as well - because of how the licensing works, vendors can add their own value without having commit those changes upstream.

 

[ddaenen1]

Whilst i believe it is useful to discuss potential options to be able to anticipate, i would not suggest to jump the gun. As i own my own business, 129 USD annually wouldn't mean a thing but the question will always be: "what's up next with Netgate?".

As i said before, i like pfSense alot and i am going to sweat it out - see what happens. I don't like and can't afford major downtime, especially not now that i am using my Nextcloud for business storage and data exchange with my accountant. As a contingency plan, I will use the NUC i bought some time ago to install a copy of 2.7 CE and upload my current config, test it and put it aside so i will be able to change over with only repatching 2 UTP cables if needed.