And now that OTV's gone, it's even harder to get semi-OK gear (that can be immediately re-flashed with OpenWRT) for a reasonable price. :(

[Hi from Regina!]

I've thought for a while that the neglect of consumer, prosumer, and small business computing is a side effect of concentration of wealth. A small percentage of businesses have all the money.

You often do not need long sales processes to get those small companies, they tend to self serve selling to themselves.

I do casual work for a person that serves that sector. It’s 100% self serve for us. We’ll pay fair value for stuff and vendors won’t ever need to interact with us. The problem is when those vendors think their firmware updater is worth a $10 / month subscription. It’s not.

For example with pfSense going closed source we’d be willing to pay around $100 total lifetime cost to put it on PCEngines hardware. We can build that in to the upfront cost of the device. I wouldn’t be shocked if they try for $50-$100 / year which won’t be economically viable for our market, so instead of getting $100 / device and never interacting with us, we’ll end up moving to a different product. I really hope they come up with an offering that’s appealing to the small business sector, but I’m not holding my breath and I’ll be learning opnsense as a contingency.