Because there are not thousands of existing routers supporting openwrt. OpenWRT needs at least 64MB RAM now and most consumer oriented crap which has that amount of RAM is expensive and under same model number you always have revisions galore most of them unsupported and some even of completely different architecture than other revisions.

Many times there is less than 50% chance that you buy a supported revision unless you go with things like Turris Omnia or Raspberry Pi..

Flashing it is also not trivial.

... but I do still think it's a good option compared to the WTF-that's-a-lot-for-a-router price of the CM4 one, especially with the current prices.

Yea, $55 for a OpenWRT router is hard to find for a quality one that supports/embraces flashing your own firmware and with 64mb+ RAM. Those come in $300-700+ flavors.

Which at that point, a true enterprise solution via ubiquiti or even cisco is affordable.

There are some real steals if you dig deep enough. Case in point the Xiaomi 4A GbE:

  * $30 (not missing a zero)
  * OpenWRT support
  * 128MB RAM
  * 3 gigabit ethernet ports
  * 802.11ac Wi-Fi

Sure it's not going to compare to a full Raspberry Pi (tiny flash, no USB, no video, no expandability), but for plain routing it's fantastic value.

These more expensive routers usually have at least 4 GBE ports, and two or three wifi radios, capable of beam forming. So it's apples and oranges.

(Mine was a used one, under $100.)

Check out GL.inet.

(I don't work for them, I just like their products)

The ubiquity edge router x is about $60+

GL.inet has some very nice little cheap devices that come with openwrt.

Flint is their newest / highest end router, has about the compute perf. of Pi3, but has WiFi 6.

The lagging customized OpenWRT release cycle worries me. My router is the thing I most want to be up to date with patches / fixes.

You can flash upstream owrt to then. You don't have to run the vendor firmware. I buy GL.iNet devices and the first thing I do is flash upstream.

wow, these look indeed great. I hope I remember these when my current router dies.

Why are some of their devices EOL if they use OpenWRT?

Because companies don't make the same product forever.

Why aren't Ford making the Model T anymore? Why aren't Viewsonic making CRT monitors anymore? etc

Of course I didn't mean hardware EOL, that I understand, but why discontinue software updates then?

Because they're a business, not a charity.

They also do this the right way and upstream device support before they sell the device, so they don't have to support it. Upstream OpenWrt are already doing it.

One quick reason why not to flash an existing OTS router is RAM.

IMHO most consumer routers need to be reset because they have memory leaks, that reduce the amount of memory available for the routing table. A power cycle becomes the common fix.

Meanwhile 4GB of RAM on PfSense can probably power an office of 50 engineers with 50% of its ram left available (and no swap)... and it will never need to be restarted.

I recently bought a TP-Link travel router and tried to install OpenWRT firmware on it, but it refused the update. I'm afraid more and more routers will have some kind of signature mechanism that will block any third-party updates.

Note: the specific router (TL-WR902AC) has a support page on OpenWRT, but apparently for newer versions it doesn't work.

If this continues, how will OpenWRT remain relevant?

It's relevant? I don't know if it's been "relevant" this decade.

It's relevant for anybody who wants to run their own flavor of software on their router for whatever reason.

It has enough hardware that you could run a few services at once. For example, Pi Hole, a Plex media server, etc. My brother does the above with a much more expensive and less capable Celeron powered Synology NAS.

UEFI bootloader, PoE support, and generally good Linux driver experience out of the box. Whether that's enough is highly dependent on the user.

I don't disagree but the headline is calling out the $55.