There was a time when I would have bought one, or recommend that a family member buy one, but I've had the same ubiquiti APs for years and I'm happy. If you sell reliable hardware, it will take you many years to see repeat business.
If you start this business, bootstrap -- don't go into debt. If you have 100 units on your shelf, you'll sell them eventually. If you have a large loan, you'll have the bank breathing down your neck -- not worth it for the margins you're after.
At small scale you can economize on shipping by finding a small business that does a lot of receiving and intercepting their cartons and packing material. You can tell if the business's cartons are right for you by glancing at their corrugated cardboard dumpster, but if you ask, they may be happy to give you a load of boxes that they did not already break down.
Sell on eBay/Amazon, but also list your items directly on a website you control where you can bypass their fees. Perhaps the price is the same, but your site can be more profitable. Amazon may de-list you for offering a direct price that's lower than you list for on their site -- but you may be able to bypass this with a coupon code.
If you get good at shipping reflashed OpenWRT routers you will probably not be netting six figures. But by developing the skills of effective marketing and fulfillment, you may find a complementary product that is even more profitable at a similar volume to a similar customer base. The business you build selling routers can make another business idea take off even more quickly.
So I actually did buy DD-WRT pre-installed on a refurbished router from a company called FlashRouters. My experience was pretty good, the router lasted ~4 years until the hardware failed. I decided not to buy my next router from the same company afterwards, for two reasons
1. they automatically enrolled me in a 'support' subscription I didn't want and I didn't realize until it renewed once, then I cancelled. it's apparently not easy selling flashed routers.
I don't begrudge them for this, though: I'm guessing they actually do have a lot of users contact support, and this business practice was a rock and a hard place situation: you don't want users to fail to install the device nor to have a bad experience because you can't afford a skilled support team. I'm not sure if they have since changed their policies.
2. I learned that, all along, ASUS has built their routers on a company-maintained downstream flavor of WRT.
So I just bought an ASUS router and haven't looked back. When I first set it up I was able to go into the admin ui and configure it similarly to how I had configured DD-WRT.
since their firmware is built on top of WRT but they're a huge manufacturer, I'd expect most of the vulns would also apply to WRT generally even if Asus is the flavor where the vulns happen to get discovered.
FWIW Asus is Taiwanese, so they have a unique national security incentive to sell clean routers; too small a country to have offensive national security like the NSA/China, yet a big target where defense against both of those is important.
A lot of Taiwanese manufacturing actually happens in China similar to the "assembled in USA" game. China has every incentive to compromise the supply chain of network gear.
> When I asked an AI how I would go about judging interest, building, raising funds, and manufacturing, it seems doable but expensive
Just a thought: make a small business out of setting up people's home networks and small business networks. The cost is negligible, you will learn about unmet demand, and you will be able to reach people who aren't technical in the process. It will cost you some money, in the sense that your service fees would almost certainly be less than your day job. On the other hand, potential customers would be paying you for market research and product development. In some respects, the market research will be more valuable in the sense that you are working with potential customers.
I say potential customers because selling a kit will reach different people. On the otherhand, it will tell you what has to go into that kit. For example: I doubt that flashing DD-WRT to existing hardware will suffice. There will be some people interested in that (someone else does the research, fear of bricking), but would those people commit to buying and setting up your product? Throw in a setup wizard that makes setting up ad blocking, VPN, or anything else that major vendors don't have much interest in simplifying, and you will likely have more success.
As someone who has worked for MSPs serving small and mid sized businesses, I would not do this. They aren't going to pay you monthly, they have very little free cash for invisible things like this. There's just no value add here. If anything goes wrong, you're on the hook. You'll need insurance for sure. They may not pay you. You'll need a lawyer on retainer. If their printer stops working, you'll have to prove it wasn't you and you're not getting paid for that time.
Stay far far away from small businesses unless you want it to be your full time job.
Ages ago I made OK money doing support contracts to SMB. Basically selling 12h use it or lose it support on monthly basis. Show them the value add and get pre-paid. Revenue in 2004 was like $120k, working maybe 20h/week, of course 2026 is very different.
This is an idea that a platform like Kickstarter used to be great at validating. I did this in 2012 and found around 500 users willing to pay for an open source photo management software.
Finding customers will be difficult. I suggest finding a couple and then talking with them to learn what they want first and then understand their willingness to purchase by offering them a device at a cost.
For me - I’m in the market. I flashed my Asus router with Merlin. I’d do the same for my next router. What might lead me to buy my next device from you?
- I like to support independent vendors when I can. (See caveats below)
- I would like a built in way to keep the firmware up to date … mine is old.
- I would want to understand the commercial equivalent router based on specs to make it easier for me to decide if it will meet my needs.
- The rest is provided by DD-wrt.
My idea is one step further: selling the device with various ad-blocking and user-selectable tiers of security configuration included. Stop your devices spying on you, detect/notify if you have any infected devices on your network. That kind of thing.
Similarly though, there's limited appeal to those who aren't already capable of setting it up themselves.
I'm still slowly pursuing this because I believe in it, whether it's profitable or not.
Love that you're doing this, this has been on the backburner in my head for a long time, but I've never got around to it and this makes it worth looking at again.
Are there any downsides or issues that come with this setup? Easy ways to disable it for specific sites or temporarily? Especially for non-technical users?
ISPs would have been able to do this kind of thing since forever but, strangely, I don't see it advertised as a potential value-add at all. Had ISP's commonly taken up such a mantle, players like NextDNS probably would be less necessary.
I only wish more of them were actually mainline openWRT so the updates from the project were guaranteed. There is a lot of these devices that run a custom version and never have their hardware support put into mainline. That isn't really much different to what all the major router companies do, they are all running OpenWRT underneith but with their own skinned interface over the top.
It's UI is too confounding. I tried once to configure a router as a bridge and gave up because it forces you into too many arcane areas to configure what should be basic functionality.
> it forces you into too many arcane areas to configure what should be basic functionality
This is a real pain point with OpenWRT, made worse by the developers' concept that there are "proper" ways to do it (which are supported by almost no other software) and so the workaround is either to do the dance or replace everything with OpenWRT that will do it "properly".
Defensible idea, but the reality is that most people who are willing to do this in the first place are trying to reuse an old router as a low-usage wireless bridge on a network that is otherwise centrally controlled like Unifi or Omada. My pool controller would be fine to run on 802.11b (setting aside what that would do to the rest of the wireless network), it doesn't need a WiFi 7 device.
I don't disagree, the UI is quite bad in places. Some of its straightforward but most of its not. Just adding a WAN interface is a lot harder than it needs to be with their new abstraction you end up making all these weird abstract pieces. The one that really irritates me is the replacement of the routers DNS with your own, like a pihole, that is really bad at the moment especially since IPv6 and IPv4 are in quite different places and a different style of input.
But its also really feature rich and with a bit of effort you work it out and you have that longevity and the security issues fixed long term, much further than the manufacturer is willing to support it.
OpenWRT - not sure why anyone would want to use dd-wrt?
I’ve thought about this as well, you could market it to gamers or content creators who care about latency. Nano pi r6s with openwrt and buffer bloat configured for their connection. Nicer/simpler UX on top maybe.
Firewalla did something similar but imo their UX is nice but actual product isn’t great (lots of issues on gigabit links ime, overpriced).
So for my part, I wouldn't fancy dd wrt but a good router with openwrt pre-flashed. Yes, I can flash it myself, but I am wealthy enough to pay the additional flash fee and rather save the time.
What I have in mind (if my dayjob fires me): open a shop for wealthy nerds, and sell all kind of pre-flashed devices, known to work well with open source firmware: power plugs, routers, thermostats,... The clientele would be very niche, but I think it might be enough for a small specialized shop.
There are some routers with OEM fork of OpenWRT that allow you to flash stock openwrt without any obstacles and by easily dropping the image blob in the web UI - just easy as upgrading the firmware from stock openwrt.
Granted, not exactly what you wished for, but pretty close.
I use a GL.inet travel router and their UI on top of OpenWRT is actually pretty good and makes connecting to strange hotel and other captive portal networks pretty straightforward. Luci is still available, or SSH.
The OpenWRT version is relatively old, and unfortunately the latest firmware requires reconfiguring family permissions, but I’ve otherwise been happy with the device. I use it for all kind of strange things (ad-hoc extending my home network for getting my solar inverter back online, tethering to my phone, etc.), but primarily use it to make it easy to get my family’s devices online while traveling (6 iPads, 3 phones, and a laptop).
There is something that a lot of people looking at businesses like this fail to realize. Something like this probably doesn't scale. You can get reasonably Wealthy opening a small specialized shop just yourself selling to just a small niche of customers. However, this business doesn't scale: You will never be worth ten million dollars opening a business like this. If you are fine with being a one or maybe two people working in a shop and earning a good income but working 40 hours a week supporting your customers, yeah, it's worth a shot to open the business. You will never be as large as Google and so you'll never be worth billions of dollars but might be good business.
Unfortunately I had to use might there and not Will. I do not know for sure if this is a good business. I would like to say I would recognize such a business if it was near me, but I don't know. I can do this myself. I don't know if you can make enough value that it's worth me paying. If it takes you three hours to flash a router, I can do that myself. And even if it takes me six hours, Three hours of your time at a reasonable wage is more than I could afford.
99.99% of people don't even buy routers, they just use the free one that comes with the connection.
For people who do buy them, there's a number of good products out there already. Why would I trust a new product from a single person, which might drop out of support after 6 months?
It was really common when equipment rental was a separate line item. I owned my own modem and router and getting the extra $15/mo dropped paid for itself the very first year.
Carrier hardware is also just a lot better now than it used to be tbh. I don't know what comcast is doing but both ISPs in my area (mediacom and tmobile fiber) are shipping Eeros. idk about the privacy aspects on that but they are good hardware otherwise.
Yep you don't save anything using your own hardware anymore, and they impose data caps if you use their modem in pass-through mode and run your own router.
I gave up and just use the Xfinity cable modem/router/access point now. Covers my entire house and even outside deck/patio/driveway. Yes they are probably snooping on my traffic and potentially proxying their "xfinitywifi" through my cable, but I use Firefox DNS over HTTPS so they can't see that, and VPN for work.
My fiber ISP has full instructions for using your own router. They mention that they won't be able to offer remote support and that if you want to use your own router, you're probably okay with that.
I was running a shell script that invoked cURL on a GL.iNet router at $DAYJOB. cURL was broken in this application with some inscrutable error that went away when I used stock openwrt.
I wouldn't go as far too call it janky. Just an openwrt with some proprietary stuff. I'm quite happy with it with my Flint 3 and it's not preventing my freedom to do whatever I want.
I also like Flint 3's skin on top of openwrt/luci, it's just easier and more convenient.
Tomaž Zaman is working on something similar, an open source router. The process of building both the product and the company is well documented on his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tomazzaman/featured. The company website is here: https://mono.si/
The website seems a bit barebones indeed, but it does list the processor used: NXP Layerscape LS1046A. The youtube channel links to discord/email, so he's probably reachable there.
I used to use dd-wrt, but I later settled on ASUS routers, and installing "ASUS Merlin" firmware on them.
I find ASUS hardware high quality in general. And using an open-source project like ASUS Merlin means the pain-points and limitations that I would face with stock firmware have been resolved to (at least to satisfactory extent) when I need reach for the hacker type configurations.
Same journey for me. Merlin does everything I need, and it's actively developed. They drop support for older devices too quickly, but everyone in the software industry seems to drop older devices as soon as new ones hit the market so they're no worse.
While it is good to have choice in commercial routers I haven't used one for a long time, instead running a virtual router on the same machine (an ex-lease DL380 G7, these have 4 ethernet ports) which hosts all services. I use a number of commercial Wifi-equipped routers as access points, these all have OpenWRT installed and all routing functionality is disabled. There's a managed 24-port switch in between the DL380 and the outside world which gets fed VLANs and separated these out into individual ports for specific hardware - printers etc. - and some of the commercial Wifi-routers also split out VLANs to their switch ports which connect to specific devices like solar inverters etc. Everything is built around OpenWRT, this includes the virtual router which is based on an X64 OpenWRT image running under ProxMox. The whole setup has been running for about 7 years now without any significant problems.
I buy hardware from a us provider ( thinkpenguin), who have something like this, and from a european provider (turris) who also do. It is a potential business with discriminating customers. If the goal is dd-wrt, I would banish the thought of anything near mass market (Walmart/Best Buy)- you have to be doing millions of units to even get into that conversation and dd-wrt is not the vehicle to sell to millions. But if you are looking for opportunity, local llm friendly home device integration of which the edge router is a small part, and of which dd-wrt is irrelevant, is a big wide open space.
I'd like a reliable and inexpensive router with OpenWrt.
It's a difficult market though:
- Vast majority people use router provided by ISP.
- Some unhappy with ISP hardware quality buy whatever they find online (in my country usually TP-Link devices)
- Enthusiasts flash OpenWrt on cheap devices, home servers or buy MikroTik devices (or similar).
- Non enthusiasts, but caring about quality and support still have some good (but more expensive) devices to pick from like Fritz!Box in Europe
People wanting pre-flashed OpenWrt will be fraction of a fraction of overall market, so you'd need to charge a lot, which puts you in direct competition with options above.
Alternately, what's the problem you're trying to solve? Who are your potential customers? Why do existing options in the market not address their needs?
There is basically no market for this. The set of humans who want a turnkey DD-WRT-type solution is functionally nonexistent. The target audience for this is people who won’t actually tinker with it but want to imagine they would. Anyone who would actually tinker with it doesn’t need it preinstalled.
Dropbox is an odd comparison because it’s not the hacker solution at all. The market for Dropbox is indeed normal folks who do not want to tinker. They want it to just work. (I buy Ubiquiti because I want it to just work.)
I assure you, this market exists. I own a RaspberryPi and have never once used it. In fact, I know several people who own several RaspberryPis and don't use them!
Kind of. There is certainly a market for aspirational tinkerers. There are people who would (and do) buy routers to install stock DD-WRT and run them basically unchanged. But that market is small and already saturated. I can type “best routers to use with DD-WRT” into Google and get a list of options that cover all price points already. Most of the options aren’t even competing directly for that narrow market but they support custom flashing so they saturate the market incidentally.
Comparing to Raspberry Pi, the analogous question would be “is there a market for Raspberry Pi with Pi OS already flashed onto a memory card”? And the answer is not much. Someone preflashing a stock image doesn’t provide much if any value.
Someone starting a new router company better have more of a value proposition than just “I’ll preinstall DD-WRT for you”.
I don't think it will work as a business. The people who want dd-wrt will just install it themselves, not pay additional for it to already be installed. However, I do think you may be able to sell an ad-blocking router with ad-blocking already installed. I think people may consider that enough of a feature to pay for.
Agree - the firmware is never really a selling point.
But a shop built around routers could have a few angles:
1) Privacy/ ad-protection native (as you say)
2) High security and performance (fully tuned DD-WRT). Even solving bufferbloat for end users would be amazing - the world is barely catching up on that.
3) Good software add-ons that aren't proprietary junk. Asset management/upgrade, sign-in/landing pages, monitoring and trafffic shaping that holds up, etc.
Bunlding FOSS to solve these problems well, even on some else's hardware, does seem like work, and work can be charged for.
Back in the day I probably modded over 100 consoles for people, Xbox, Wii, DS, Switch, PS3.... I can't say that even once the person cared about hearing what XBMC was and all the things it could theoretically do. They just cared about being able to play/watch things with the press of the button without having to know any of the tech aspects.
Anyone I knew that could mod consoles just did it themselves.
What I really want and haven't seen is a proper mesh router setup that runs DD-WRT or something open-source. In bigger homes really a mesh system is your best hope since your internet access usually comes in on a corner somewhere, but I really don't trust any of the options I have (with the possible exception of one, whose name escapes me at the moment).
In bigger homes your best bet is to find a way to run Ethernet. My experience with mesh was mediocre to bad and I feel like that’s what I hear from everyone else who tries it.
Running ethernet over the whole home is an expensive job, may not even be realistic depending on the home's construction, and definitely isn't possible if you're renting. It's not perfect and not as good as ethernet for sure, but it's better than using a single router.
It really is, but you will still want wifi, so you need a team of internet connected wifi points with central control, which play nicely with each other. I have use Ubiquiti in the past. Is there an open source version of what they do?
GL.iNet is more open (they run an OpenWRT fork that they open source with a proprietary GUI on top). They have a beta for a mesh system on top of that: https://www.gl-inet.com/en-us/pages/mesh . I haven't tried the mesh, but I have had very good experiences with a few of their routers and they are what I recommend to friends.
Ubiquiti mesh stuff works very well and is an overall polished experience. Supposedly their APs are at least distantly descended from OpenWRT but they are not open source. Their platform is pretty open in terms of integrating with other stuff and not locking you in, at least.
+1
I put as much as I can on wired ethernet. The WiFi is mostly for laptops & phones. I have a couple of APs (OpenWRT) that aren't meshed but I run 802.11r on them.
You're approaching this from the wrong angle it's not the technology in the router average people are buying. They care about ease of use, reliability, and features. In that order. Dropbox won because it provided rsync in an easy to understand product. If ddwrt allows you to build features into routers that have good UX for average people then you win. What would those features be? That's the work you should be doing
Off the top of my head. A mobile app for setting up and remotely monitoring and controlling my home network. Pihole/pivpn built in with wireguard and a good UX for creating tunnels. Host isolation. A local llm that I can ask questions and get fixed (why can't I print to the printer from my laptop on ssid1. Fix it). Kid friendly things for parents. Easy kid schedules and device groups to limit screen time and reports on what sites they visited.
Ubiquitis amplifi app had a decent mobile app with some of these things.
I would pay if I could get an openwrt router that was already set up with features like
- ad-blocking
- kid network vs grown-up network vs guest network
- blocking sites (on kid network), with easy way to temporarily disable or disable on a schedule
- safe and regular updates from openwrt, that I can trust will work even if your company goes bust (ie. your layer on top needs to play well with upstream)
IMHO, those who want a router with open-source firmware are going to have the technical knowledge to do the finding and flashing themselves, by virtue of being embedded in tech deeply enough to recognize the value of an open-source firmware in the first place.
Those who look at you blankly when you mention open-source router firmware aren’t likely going to become customers.
You would be surprised at how many people that know enough to be curious but are not ready to jump straight into flashing custom firmware yet. I've seen people sell pre-flashed wired and wireless routers like this for years on platforms like EBay. I think there's already a niche there, even if it's small.
I'm not sure how approachable tools like Claude Code have made this for people though. If I was just getting started, I would probably just have the tool do it for me.
I know how to flash firmware, but I'd still rather buy routers that have open-source firmware pre-flashed and tested by the vendor. This is simply because I've often run into issues with OpenWrt. I once bought a bunch of Archer C7s because it was described as a good router for OpenWrt, only to discover dmesg full of crashes from the proprietary wireless firmware running on the 5Ghz chip. In another case, I learned long after installing OpenWrt that the performance was much worse than stock firmware because OpenWrt didn't support hardware routing offload.
DD-WRT doesn't upgrade the Linux kernel in the device you flash it to - this is what enables it to use the closed-source drivers that A) require a specific Linux kernel version and B) are typically a Broadcom thing. You're still getting a more stable and performant device in most cases but not necessarily a more secure one or one with newer kernel features. So I prefer OpenWRT and devices that allow OpenWRT to fully work.
> I would buy a low-power SFF PC with dual NICs, run OPNsense or OpenWrt, and use the wireless routers strictly as access points.
If you can fish an old PC with a few GB of RAM made since 2006 or so out of the trash, you're halfway there. Get a cheap 32GB SSD and a second PCIe NIC off of Amazon, and go for it. You can run OpenWRT on x86.
Wouldn’t trust it at this point … but what I would trust is a blank router that has a GitHub repo with a containerized build that I could run on my own machine and something ai ish that lets me flash it :)
Would be legit to be able to have an Llm do a source audit before installing …. Not perfect but damn sure better than nothing
Check out TekLager. They're Swedish, and I've bought a router from them before - excellent build quality. I think they make or made several themselves, possibly from pre-existing designs (unsure how open source the hardware is.) They can come pre-installed with various open source OSes.
Not affiliated, just a happy customer. If you're thinking of getting in a similar business and are not a competitor in Sweden, drop them a line. When I spoke to them they were very friendly.
I did build my own router, two actually, but opted into buying one of the Deciso appliances with OPNSense pre-installed for the main WAN connection from my house to the ISP upstream.
The biggest reason I did that is that I wanted four ports, not two, and I could not find a mini-ITX motherboard or any other commodity form factor with four ports built-in. Once you have to add an expansion card, you need a case quite a bit larger than what you're used to for a home network appliance.
That's an underfilled niche, small form factor single boards with more than two high-speed NICs, but presumably it's underfilled for a reason, which is there aren't many individual consumers, as opposed to third-party packagers like Deciso who sell appliances to enterprises, who want these. The other consideration is server-grade mini-ITX boards that have even two onboard NICs have a whole lot of other features not needed in a networking appliance that end up consuming more power than is ideal. If you could offer such boards, with or without a case, with or without a pre-installed operating system, I'd definitely be interested, but I'm one guy. Don't build a business on scratching the itch of notoriously stingy homelab enthusiasts. We're the kind of people who will gladly pay $400 a week on groceries and then scoff at a $10 a year software subscription as something unconscionable.
You need to remind yourself that the overwhelming majority of populace are not HN users. Most just want a cheap "internet box" that gives them WiFi. If any had interest in going deeper into networking, they would build a router themselves. But if you had some extra unique features on top of DD-WRT, that might turn a few heads. I do recall Tomaz Zaman on Youtube building their own router completely from scratch - not saying it's 100% what you plan on doing, just a reference point for you to look at.
I run a GL.inet, which is generally great. Though I sometimes wonder about trust, the logistic side of things, etc, in a Snowden sense.
I had been running an xfinity router*, which received an update blocking admin access without using a phone app. That was a red line. I also did not want to take the chance of borking a supposedly compatible router, and wasn't really into researching and gambling; so finding gl.inet was a big relief. The default admin login is crap though. There is no password. This is not super substantial in itself, but the eccentric initial connection process is often broken, and can take dozens or more attempts, and in my case, it was dozens. No reset fixes it either -- it's design.
I want it, in the same way I want a laptop with Linux. I can install it myself, and I already have done, but I wish the option was viable for most others, so that more of the market is open source.
For routers, the only realistic way that can happen is by getting some big vendor to adopt ddwrt or openwrt to offload (some of) the job of writing the firmware. And even then, most people use their ISP provided router. A niche vendor supplying preflashed routers isn't going to make a dent.
If you had asked me 10 or 15 years ago, yes. At some point I decided I am happy enough with a FritzBox (maybe also because of the included modem, so less devices) for home use - and then added 2 of the cheaper mikrotik devices.
I think there is a market, but it's small. I would absolutely not replace my setup now after spending some money just this year. Had this offer existed last year, maybe (but I have also thought about a Turris Omnia in the past...)
Disclaimer: I have used DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato and for the sake of this argument, they're interchangeable to me. Something FLOSS that I can configure, but I've not even checked what the market provides for many years.
At this point it’s generally cheaper for the things I want (10G/2.5G ports; frequent security updates; advanced routing including site to site VPNs; very fast boot times; ability to have two redundant routers) to simply have an old PC where I can control those things.
There are some Chinese companies making more open router dev boards like Banana Pi R4. You can install openwrt out of the box. But generally, the SoCs that power the current generation of routers are locked down / highly proprietary (and always have been). It's the chips, not the boards, which matter most.
Dropbox had basically no competition at the time as the idea of cloud files was barely in the market.
Meanwhile, home routers with meshing and security and built-in cloud management planes with easy apps are already cheap.
What would your pitch be when mom & dad would probably just stumble on Amazon Eero or Netgear Orbi? Someone already brought fire back to the home market, you can't differentiate if you're just putting up a site and a device, unless you hit some absurd low-$ cost in an already low-margin industry.
You'd be better off looking for a niche or industry where the edges are sharp, the tooling is bad or inconsistent, and there's no clear winner.
> Do you want a router that has DD-WRT pre-installed?
No, not really. I build my own routers using commodity hardware and Debian. If I had to go back to consumer hardware, I would get a GL.Inet or other off-the-shelf router that supports OpenWrt and flash it.
It's an ordinary x86 PC with a dual NIC. It's more than a router though, I also host all types of servers on it (email, Web, Podman host, various games). It does not break a sweat.
Ages ago you could download binaries for Buffalo routers (g300nh / g300nh2) and flash it through the web ui. If you tried to build those images yourself, though, it would fail at the final step because the signing tools / keys were only in the possession of BrainSlayer / Sebastian. Other platforms relied on binary blobs for wlan drivers, and things like that.
Out of the two of them DD-WRT is more "hacky" and duct-taped together, while OpenWrt is more "pure". This can mean that DD-WRT feels more feature complete at times.
Buffalo shipped the WZR series routers with DD-WRT. But they stopped making them when the FCC restricted router firmware about a decade ago.
I bought a pair of them at the time. Kept one (N600) until I needed a 'mesh' and sold it on eBay about four years ago. Replaced it with an Orbi system that doesn't need to phone home (not sure such things are still available in the consumer market).
The ones that I had came with Buffalo firmware but you could load DD-WRT on them through the web ui. To load OpenWrt you had to use tftp and catch it during boot.
I ended up adding support for the G300NH2 model for OpenWrt.
I'd only be interested in a platform I could trust completely, with no proprietary firmware or software blobs required. Short of that, if I have to trust someone, I'm probably just going to trust Cisco or Ubiquiti given they're western and have been around for a while with a relatively good track record and a lot of money to lose if they're found to have been negligent or malicious.
I think there's a market there for a fully open platform, but it's probably not very easy to pull off given how secretive the chip vendors seem to be.
I just bought a used Extreme Networks AP that shipped with OpenWRT installed. I appreciated the convenience of something that was partly done before I got it.
It's currently serving as a wireless bridge client for a network of 10 IP cameras.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I think that routers are a pretty geeky thing that most people don't want to hear about. I had offered to buy and set up a pfsense router for my parents for a few years ago and they were decidedly not interested, even after I tried explaining the merits of it. Pretty much anyone who is going to be interested in DD-WRT is going to be someone who can set it up themselves.
pfsense can sell for a relatively high price, I think, because they market themselves more towards businesses and big corporations.
Right, because 99% of their customer base does not care. TikTok and YouTube work without "bridge mode," as does Fortnight / Roblox / Minecraft. Any random Comcast or AT&T Fiber subscriber on the street won't be able to tell you what "bridge mode" does.
I used to use pfsense and openwrt and stuff but now with Claude I just use a custom Linux distribution running on a dell 2u. That being said I have 25 gbps of internet across 5 internet providers (puerto Rico) and that plugs into my internal home network running at 2x 25 gbps . So for savings it’s like two quad 10 gbps cards. I’ve found substantial speed advantages via consumer hardware considering the cross sectional bandwidth is like 70 gbps
Don't you just launch a good router? Some people will be attracted by the open source firmware. Some will be attached by a good router. You will be attracted by not having to write firmware.
Another way of looking at this, find an industry or community that have particular needs in a router and sell to them
The OpenWrt One is really not a great piece of hardware. No 6GHz, and only two Ethernet ports, one of which is only 1Gbit. The latest GL.iNet products are apparently better, but also apparently don't run stock OpenWrt, only a fork of it. In other words, there's still plenty of room in the market for good routers with open-source firmware.
I'll tell you what i wouldn't get - if you have an asus router, i'd steer clear of merlin
They leave a bunch of data sharing options built in and on by default with no warning, acknowledgement, etc and I suspect it's why asus lets the project continue to run
Interesting related question -- I recently inherited several WiFI AP/Routers that are openwrt or DDWRT compatible. Are there any packages that folks are working on, or know of that can centrally manage a fleet of them?
If there wasn't, I was going to use this as a project to explore vibecoding...
Happy OPNsense user here, with no current plans to change. Ruckus unleashed + brocade ICX treat me very well.
The all-in-one router indeed are only access points to me, and I don't exactly wish 'only having an AIO router' on people.
I generally prefer vanilla OpwnWRT or maaaaaaybe one of the nicer Tomato forks.
There's a Hong Kong company called GL-iNet which makes routers whose OEM firmware is just OpenWRT plus their own web interface, but they actually also have the stock one from upstream pre-installed as well.
I've bought routers from them for years. I usually make sure that they're fully supported in a stable upstream release of OpenWRT, then replace the firmware with vanilla, which is no fuss. Then they continue to get firmware upgrades for many years.
DD-WRT I think of as a messy thing for backporting as many features as possible to routers that are locked to old kernels because they rely on super proprietary radio firmware blobs.
Take a look at GL-iNet, the WRT routers from Linksys, and the OpnWRT One or whatever it was, and try to figure out where you might fit in that landscape. Maybe you can support some features they don't, maybe you can take a radical upstream-first approach to appeal to free software enthusiasts, or maybe you can market to Americans who want manufacturer based in their own country. But those are antecedents who may also be your competitors, so it's with seeing what they're doing.
I have an old Flint and a newer Flint 2, plus a handful of travel routers that I use as wireless Ethernet bridges to get reliable pseudo-wired connections in my house without running cables. (Those can be really handy for devices that are a pain to configure even if they do have wifi, like printers.)
I wouldn't buy any of their stuff if not for OpenWRT— that's the killer feature for me. But I'm quite happy with quality and features from GL-iNet as well. I recommend them to everyone.
Brainslayer is (and has been) a complete nutjob for decades. To say DD-WRT is an "open source" project is stretching things to breaking point.
To get a device "supported" by DD-WRT you have to send Brainslayer a router. Nobody else can build the project because he intentionally obfuscates and breaks the build process as much as possible to "prevent people from selling DD-WRT" (as you're proposing doing here)
Once he receives it. He simply takes the vendor GPL firmware tarball and glues DD-WRT's UI onto it. There's no improved security for a DD-WRT device. Particularly the Broadcom ones back in the late 2000's/early 2010's when DD-WRT was more popular, Brainslayer never bothered to update from the 2.6.18 kernels the devices came with which left the Wi-Fi performance absolutely lacking.
OpenWRT is a completely different bet. But then you're fighting with GL.iNet who are literally a Taiwanese OEM selling OpenWRT-out-of-the-box devices
Thinkpenguin used to sell Rosewill routers that came with a particular Linux installed, but their value add was no proprietary blobs, everything open source and FSF certified IIRC.
"So, do you actuallly want a router with DD-WRT pre-installed?"
I bought a router with no OS pre-installed
I chose Coreboot to be pre-installed as a convenience
I prefer to boot from USB stick or the network; there's no secondary storage, only max amount of RAM, no Wifi
The computer is sold as a "router". But for me any computer that runs a kernel I have enabled to forward packets is a "router" and any "router" is a computer I can use for any purpose (within the limits of the hardware)
> do you actually want a router that you can buy with DD-WRT pre-installed?
I don't think many people particularly care that their router has DD-WRT installed, and I also think you're asking the wrong question. Many people just want their network hardware and software to be fast and reliable. I know when I flashed DD-WRT onto my old Linksys router back in the day, it wasn't for any philosophical reason: it was that the default software was hot garbage, I didn't have the money to buy a new router, and DD-WRT promised to fix some of the problems I was running into.
(And yeah, there are _some_ people who really, really want DD-WRT on their router. They probably aren't your target customer unless you're also selling hardware that is cheaper and better than whatever they can acquire and flash themselves)
Wow, the timing of this question is eerie. Just last week, I got tired of talking about segmenting my network but never doing it. So I did some research, asked some friends, and settled on the following:
* An Opnsense firewall (purchased from Deciso; ie: "official" hardware)
* An OpenWRT One (ie: "official" hardware) to be used as an access point
* A Microtik switch (SW OS, not Router OS)
My plan is to create multiple SSIDs, have each one on a different vlan, and then control services provided to that vlan. For example, I'll dump all IOT crap onto a vlan that doesn't have internet access.
I'm still not 100% sure it will work (the hardware still hasn't arrived). But finally, to answer your question: "Yes!"
Holy crap, give me official hardware. I installed DD-WRT on my linsys router. It's been so long that I don't remember exact details, but the process was INTIMIDATING. I felt like I had to download a blob from a website that wasn't the official website (ie: I seem to recall different people building DD-WRT for different hardware). I also recall some features not being available on some hardware.
Give me the hardware that is sold by the people that work on the project!
I want some reassurance that I have the "most supported hardware", so I don't have to go through huge feature matrices to see if my hardware supports feature X.
I want headroom to install new packages. I don't want to have so little space that I need to remove one package to install another.
And finally, I want the people writing the software to GET PAID, because I want it to still be around... and being actively developed 10 years from now.
PS:
I initially wanted to get a consumer grade switch, but my network operator friends told me that was a terrible idea... and that I should get a use Cisco switch on Ebay. Cisco is probably great and network operators love it... but holy crap... trying to figure out what switch to buy is an enormous pain in the a$$. I pushed my friends, they relented and said: "Mikrotik is also great". I went to their website. 1000 times better than Cisco's; their switches were cheaper. I didn't have to "call for a quote" or scour Ebay. I haven't turned it on yet, but the buying experience was so much better.
I'm currently running OPNSense on one of those small N95 devices as a Virtual Machine, as my primary router/firewall and DHCP server for my (recently setup) handful of VLANs.
Whilst I have backups of the VM itself, as well as backups of the OPNSense configuration at various different times, one of the things I'd like to have is a cheap, drop-in device that is able to do all those same things. Having a hardware device that runs OpenWRT to do this would, as far as I can tell, be perfect for this, since OpenWRT's configuration can be backed up and applied to another device (I'm sure there are some traps for young players in regards to interface names etc. but I'm also sure they're not insurmountable). So any device that can run OpenWRT that has the hardware capacity to keep up with my setup, is drop-in-able.
An additional benefit of this is that the same / similar configurations can be deployed to various friends and family for both secure networks and relatively quick, easy, and cheap replacement in the event of hardware failure.
... and possibly sellable as a device and / or service. Basically cheap option: OpenWRT on compatible off-the-shelf device, expensive option: OPNSense VM on mini PC.
they're entirely different beasts. dd-wrt is more or less a normal linux distro that targets embedded devices. it has a "unified config" that abstracts away configs for many packages, but those abstractions are leaky. when you log in by ssh, you're using a shell and editor to edit config files.
compared with RouterOS where the Linux bits are almost completely hidden behind the proprietary config engine (and the proprietary cli and webuis that power that config engine). for the most part with routeros, you'd be hard pressed to know that you're even on a unix let alone linux.
As the other commenter said - but if you loved IOS before it was iOS you’ll find routeros comfortable if different, if you like rc.d you’ll like DD-WRT.
I used to use DD-WRT, and Tomato, and Shibby's mod of Tomato, and Advanced Tomato, and other stuff. Somewhere, I'm sure I still have a WRT54GS that I hacked ~20 years ago to accept SD cards. It was a fun time in using inexpensive hardware in unintended ways.
At one point, and I don't remember exactly when, I just started using OpenWRT instead. It wasn't always the case, but it presents a very usable GUI straight away these days and it has a ton of flexibility for getting creative later.
At home I run it on a Pi4 that I bought for the purpose. It keeps up with my 500/20Mbps DOCSIS internet very well indeed. I've used it with a USB NIC to get dedicated ports, and also with VLANs and a managed switch instead. I just download and flash the card, plug stuff in, and configure it. No real issues -- for years, now. (Wireless is provided by Mikrotik access points.)
When something faster happens in my neighborhood (which may be very soon; I had a very brief chat with a dude whose fiber splicing trailer was parked across the street just yesterday), I'll probably want to move to something more capable.
That could be in the form of faster Pi, or an old PC running OPNsense -- or even stick with OpenWRT. No big deal.
If I really wanted a tidier package for light-weight travel or something, then I guess I'd pick something appropriate from glinet and put an official OpenWRT image on it.
For heavier-travel, I've got a kit with a Pi4, a managed PoE switch, and a backup Mikrotik box (that can be a switch or a router; it runs OpenWRT as well and the normal config is that it just provides more switch ports), and all this stuff is mounted onto a 1U rack shelf that is in-turn inside of a road case. It's meant to be physically durable and to include enough gear that if any part of it dies then I can replace that functionality Right Now without spending time finding parts in the middle of nowhere.
So, no: I would not buy one that was prefabulated. It wouldn't scratch my itch.
---
For everyone else? Honestly, the regular folks I know who ask me questions about networking aren't into that stuff at all or they wouldn't be asking. They don't care about ultimate speeds, or latency under load, or any of those things. They don't care about running Internet services from their network, or services on their local network, and probably don't even have a printer to abuse if something goes awry. They're also not interested in exploring the bowels of their home to install cabling for PoE access points.
They just want decent-enough wifi coverage that they don't have to think about it, and then: They want to succeed at not thinking about it.
So for those folks, I've come to recommend proprietary multi-node mesh systems. It doesn't really matter to me which one it is, or how terrible some aspect or other is: They all tend to check the right boxes, they update themselves, and then: Nobody thinks about them.
Several companies/single owner LLC's do this for a massively inflated price.
I understand why the inflated price, support and warranties, etc.
IT is not that hard for people who are technically inclined.
People who are not into it don't understand why.
If placement/marketing was for SMB that wanted to maximize dd-wrt usage and get a support contract in place I can see that
but outside of that, and a marketing youtube channel and being proactive on reddit, Idk how much can it scale and what point will you not get a cease and desist from vendors because I'm sure they have something nasty in their terms of service, which I think you may need to click through to enable the flash.
You've identified your market competiton price points, and all have deeper pockets than you, but do not offer free, open source software.
WRT3200ACM and the other previous model is a fab of mine to grab, it's been a year but I've collected 10+ and deploeyd them in strategic places for personal use,
You wouldn't need regulatory approval IMO.
prototyping, what type? You'd follow the release schedule, get the best flavors/models and support those.
Overtime maybe you'd contribute back to the project, especially during hardware revisions. But it is very different from buying used hardware from ebay and flashing it to resell vs buying new and selling it as a value add on.
1. Yes, proper hacker route.
2. Proper route to an extent, it legitmiazes support, warranty and security.
3. Expensive, time consuming but, doable but not likely.
Yeah, the dropbox comment is infamous, but that was about launching a new SAAS that has infinite potential scale and solved a problem no one really wanted to fix at the time outside of one drive (which sucked at the time, was called skydrive afaik) and usb sticks which are...great but USB3 was new, usb2 was there and people were arguing back and forth why usb3 wasn't working or such
so:
to answer your question you need to really figure out a basic marketing question of 3 P's.
Product
Price
Placement.
Product is DD-WRT.
Price: It's free.
Placement: People that know what it is but don't have free time to install it?
No, not quite right, right? Let's try again:
Product: DD-WRT routers preconfigured for enterprise support and SMB.
Price: Retail price of router + $100 per sold, with 1 yr warranty, additional warranty and stuff available at x and y?
Placement: People that know what it is about but don't have free time ot install it or want to offshore this for a price.
Slightly better, but still:
So do I want it?
I welcome anything FOSS in general w/ GNU/Linux and its a much needed stepping stone to continue having a decentralized internet:
but if it was so easy, people would've done it already, and they do.
It also reminds me of fontana which is how I netted a free WRT54G for offering what exactly, I don't know, but boy did I flash DD-wrt on that badboy and link it to my neighbors WiFi for free roadrunner internet to get my anime fansubs. So while as much as I'd like for the idea to flourish/am surprised wardriving and torrenting anime was a vector for getting me into tech I don't see it much out of a hobby business
and that is 100% OK
If you throw $5-10k a year at it, I think you can corner the niche, use AI automaiton for marketing campaigns, target tech conventions/festivals (like VCF) and youtube to build a audience it can scale.
but 125k? wow, no way - you ccan really do this for much less.
back to the scope of a opensource router: same as above, but if you really want, you need to find a manufacturer that already has a pre built configuration that at minimum supports the newest radio and minimum gigabit ethernet. GLI has theirs at $169, and hardware is a miminmal markup business, you can really find something similar to that and do a proper hardware cycle with a manufacturer and somewhat a contract but thats 50K including FCC licensing (if you know what to do, and you do the licensing yoruself, as well as Electrek/uL to cover CSPC. But hey, in todays world, everyone (well for past 30 years too) just makes it up and folds thier llc when caught.
For more business minded ideas, heres one about MSO/s and GLP1 from a Ycombinator 3x foudner and I comment with the same dissent:
So tl;dr why not pitch it for ycombinator winter, I think it's still open for submissions.
Add AI (why not, right?) and you can have a walking talking configuratuion wizard guide you to addung ublock,adblock, pihole, etc instead of the broken ecosystem we have today within dd-wrt because while I clearly can spot the pain points and issues, I lack the ability to turn them into viable selling points for investors to give me money and I should fix that someday :(
There was a time when I would have bought one, or recommend that a family member buy one, but I've had the same ubiquiti APs for years and I'm happy. If you sell reliable hardware, it will take you many years to see repeat business.
If you start this business, bootstrap -- don't go into debt. If you have 100 units on your shelf, you'll sell them eventually. If you have a large loan, you'll have the bank breathing down your neck -- not worth it for the margins you're after.
At small scale you can economize on shipping by finding a small business that does a lot of receiving and intercepting their cartons and packing material. You can tell if the business's cartons are right for you by glancing at their corrugated cardboard dumpster, but if you ask, they may be happy to give you a load of boxes that they did not already break down.
Sell on eBay/Amazon, but also list your items directly on a website you control where you can bypass their fees. Perhaps the price is the same, but your site can be more profitable. Amazon may de-list you for offering a direct price that's lower than you list for on their site -- but you may be able to bypass this with a coupon code.
If you get good at shipping reflashed OpenWRT routers you will probably not be netting six figures. But by developing the skills of effective marketing and fulfillment, you may find a complementary product that is even more profitable at a similar volume to a similar customer base. The business you build selling routers can make another business idea take off even more quickly.
So I actually did buy DD-WRT pre-installed on a refurbished router from a company called FlashRouters. My experience was pretty good, the router lasted ~4 years until the hardware failed. I decided not to buy my next router from the same company afterwards, for two reasons
1. they automatically enrolled me in a 'support' subscription I didn't want and I didn't realize until it renewed once, then I cancelled. it's apparently not easy selling flashed routers.
I don't begrudge them for this, though: I'm guessing they actually do have a lot of users contact support, and this business practice was a rock and a hard place situation: you don't want users to fail to install the device nor to have a bad experience because you can't afford a skilled support team. I'm not sure if they have since changed their policies.
2. I learned that, all along, ASUS has built their routers on a company-maintained downstream flavor of WRT.
So I just bought an ASUS router and haven't looked back. When I first set it up I was able to go into the admin ui and configure it similarly to how I had configured DD-WRT.
Asus has a ton of security vulnerabilities over the years and for that reason I wouldn’t trust them
since their firmware is built on top of WRT but they're a huge manufacturer, I'd expect most of the vulns would also apply to WRT generally even if Asus is the flavor where the vulns happen to get discovered.
FWIW Asus is Taiwanese, so they have a unique national security incentive to sell clean routers; too small a country to have offensive national security like the NSA/China, yet a big target where defense against both of those is important.
Asus had a bunch of their own 9.8 CVEs, I don't think they worry about NSA or China, as most consumer brands.
A lot of Taiwanese manufacturing actually happens in China similar to the "assembled in USA" game. China has every incentive to compromise the supply chain of network gear.
> When I asked an AI how I would go about judging interest, building, raising funds, and manufacturing, it seems doable but expensive
Just a thought: make a small business out of setting up people's home networks and small business networks. The cost is negligible, you will learn about unmet demand, and you will be able to reach people who aren't technical in the process. It will cost you some money, in the sense that your service fees would almost certainly be less than your day job. On the other hand, potential customers would be paying you for market research and product development. In some respects, the market research will be more valuable in the sense that you are working with potential customers.
I say potential customers because selling a kit will reach different people. On the otherhand, it will tell you what has to go into that kit. For example: I doubt that flashing DD-WRT to existing hardware will suffice. There will be some people interested in that (someone else does the research, fear of bricking), but would those people commit to buying and setting up your product? Throw in a setup wizard that makes setting up ad blocking, VPN, or anything else that major vendors don't have much interest in simplifying, and you will likely have more success.
As someone who has worked for MSPs serving small and mid sized businesses, I would not do this. They aren't going to pay you monthly, they have very little free cash for invisible things like this. There's just no value add here. If anything goes wrong, you're on the hook. You'll need insurance for sure. They may not pay you. You'll need a lawyer on retainer. If their printer stops working, you'll have to prove it wasn't you and you're not getting paid for that time.
Stay far far away from small businesses unless you want it to be your full time job.
Ages ago I made OK money doing support contracts to SMB. Basically selling 12h use it or lose it support on monthly basis. Show them the value add and get pre-paid. Revenue in 2004 was like $120k, working maybe 20h/week, of course 2026 is very different.
This is an idea that a platform like Kickstarter used to be great at validating. I did this in 2012 and found around 500 users willing to pay for an open source photo management software.
Finding customers will be difficult. I suggest finding a couple and then talking with them to learn what they want first and then understand their willingness to purchase by offering them a device at a cost.
For me - I’m in the market. I flashed my Asus router with Merlin. I’d do the same for my next router. What might lead me to buy my next device from you?
- I like to support independent vendors when I can. (See caveats below) - I would like a built in way to keep the firmware up to date … mine is old. - I would want to understand the commercial equivalent router based on specs to make it easier for me to decide if it will meet my needs. - The rest is provided by DD-wrt.
Happy to be user #1. Contact in profile.
My idea is one step further: selling the device with various ad-blocking and user-selectable tiers of security configuration included. Stop your devices spying on you, detect/notify if you have any infected devices on your network. That kind of thing.
Similarly though, there's limited appeal to those who aren't already capable of setting it up themselves.
I'm still slowly pursuing this because I believe in it, whether it's profitable or not.
Edited to add: Part of what I'm setting up: https://lists.uninvitedactivity.com/DNS/, a vague explainer here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49990394
Love that you're doing this, this has been on the backburner in my head for a long time, but I've never got around to it and this makes it worth looking at again.
Are there any downsides or issues that come with this setup? Easy ways to disable it for specific sites or temporarily? Especially for non-technical users?
nextdns is in a perfect position to do this...
They can do part of it, yes.
ISPs would have been able to do this kind of thing since forever but, strangely, I don't see it advertised as a potential value-add at all. Had ISP's commonly taken up such a mantle, players like NextDNS probably would be less necessary.
I think OpenWrt is the more significant project nowadays, and routers with OpenWrt pre-installed are already available
I only wish more of them were actually mainline openWRT so the updates from the project were guaranteed. There is a lot of these devices that run a custom version and never have their hardware support put into mainline. That isn't really much different to what all the major router companies do, they are all running OpenWRT underneith but with their own skinned interface over the top.
It's UI is too confounding. I tried once to configure a router as a bridge and gave up because it forces you into too many arcane areas to configure what should be basic functionality.
> it forces you into too many arcane areas to configure what should be basic functionality
This is a real pain point with OpenWRT, made worse by the developers' concept that there are "proper" ways to do it (which are supported by almost no other software) and so the workaround is either to do the dance or replace everything with OpenWRT that will do it "properly".
Defensible idea, but the reality is that most people who are willing to do this in the first place are trying to reuse an old router as a low-usage wireless bridge on a network that is otherwise centrally controlled like Unifi or Omada. My pool controller would be fine to run on 802.11b (setting aside what that would do to the rest of the wireless network), it doesn't need a WiFi 7 device.
I don't disagree, the UI is quite bad in places. Some of its straightforward but most of its not. Just adding a WAN interface is a lot harder than it needs to be with their new abstraction you end up making all these weird abstract pieces. The one that really irritates me is the replacement of the routers DNS with your own, like a pihole, that is really bad at the moment especially since IPv6 and IPv4 are in quite different places and a different style of input.
But its also really feature rich and with a bit of effort you work it out and you have that longevity and the security issues fixed long term, much further than the manufacturer is willing to support it.
Yeah, I have several GL.iNet routers with OpenWRT preinstalled.
By default, it runs a custom shell, but Luci is easy enough to switch to.
Or Opnsense
OpenWRT - not sure why anyone would want to use dd-wrt?
I’ve thought about this as well, you could market it to gamers or content creators who care about latency. Nano pi r6s with openwrt and buffer bloat configured for their connection. Nicer/simpler UX on top maybe.
Firewalla did something similar but imo their UX is nice but actual product isn’t great (lots of issues on gigabit links ime, overpriced).
So for my part, I wouldn't fancy dd wrt but a good router with openwrt pre-flashed. Yes, I can flash it myself, but I am wealthy enough to pay the additional flash fee and rather save the time.
What I have in mind (if my dayjob fires me): open a shop for wealthy nerds, and sell all kind of pre-flashed devices, known to work well with open source firmware: power plugs, routers, thermostats,... The clientele would be very niche, but I think it might be enough for a small specialized shop.
There are some routers with OEM fork of OpenWRT that allow you to flash stock openwrt without any obstacles and by easily dropping the image blob in the web UI - just easy as upgrading the firmware from stock openwrt.
Granted, not exactly what you wished for, but pretty close.
The time to do this is <5 minutes. One such router I personally know of is GL.iNet GL-MT6000: https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-mt6000
I use a GL.inet travel router and their UI on top of OpenWRT is actually pretty good and makes connecting to strange hotel and other captive portal networks pretty straightforward. Luci is still available, or SSH.
The OpenWRT version is relatively old, and unfortunately the latest firmware requires reconfiguring family permissions, but I’ve otherwise been happy with the device. I use it for all kind of strange things (ad-hoc extending my home network for getting my solar inverter back online, tethering to my phone, etc.), but primarily use it to make it easy to get my family’s devices online while traveling (6 iPads, 3 phones, and a laptop).
There is something that a lot of people looking at businesses like this fail to realize. Something like this probably doesn't scale. You can get reasonably Wealthy opening a small specialized shop just yourself selling to just a small niche of customers. However, this business doesn't scale: You will never be worth ten million dollars opening a business like this. If you are fine with being a one or maybe two people working in a shop and earning a good income but working 40 hours a week supporting your customers, yeah, it's worth a shot to open the business. You will never be as large as Google and so you'll never be worth billions of dollars but might be good business.
Unfortunately I had to use might there and not Will. I do not know for sure if this is a good business. I would like to say I would recognize such a business if it was near me, but I don't know. I can do this myself. I don't know if you can make enough value that it's worth me paying. If it takes you three hours to flash a router, I can do that myself. And even if it takes me six hours, Three hours of your time at a reasonable wage is more than I could afford.
99.99% of people don't even buy routers, they just use the free one that comes with the connection.
For people who do buy them, there's a number of good products out there already. Why would I trust a new product from a single person, which might drop out of support after 6 months?
Probably more like 80%. I know even some normies who go far out of their way to refuse Comcast's hardware.
It was really common when equipment rental was a separate line item. I owned my own modem and router and getting the extra $15/mo dropped paid for itself the very first year.
Carrier hardware is also just a lot better now than it used to be tbh. I don't know what comcast is doing but both ISPs in my area (mediacom and tmobile fiber) are shipping Eeros. idk about the privacy aspects on that but they are good hardware otherwise.
Yep you don't save anything using your own hardware anymore, and they impose data caps if you use their modem in pass-through mode and run your own router.
I gave up and just use the Xfinity cable modem/router/access point now. Covers my entire house and even outside deck/patio/driveway. Yes they are probably snooping on my traffic and potentially proxying their "xfinitywifi" through my cable, but I use Firefox DNS over HTTPS so they can't see that, and VPN for work.
My fiber ISP has full instructions for using your own router. They mention that they won't be able to offer remote support and that if you want to use your own router, you're probably okay with that.
No, I want a router with OpenWrt pre-installed.
So I buy GL.iNet routers, which come with OpenWrt pre-installed.
Janky version though? My comment a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49494259
The first thing I do is install upstream owrt.
I was running a shell script that invoked cURL on a GL.iNet router at $DAYJOB. cURL was broken in this application with some inscrutable error that went away when I used stock openwrt.
I wouldn't go as far too call it janky. Just an openwrt with some proprietary stuff. I'm quite happy with it with my Flint 3 and it's not preventing my freedom to do whatever I want.
I also like Flint 3's skin on top of openwrt/luci, it's just easier and more convenient.
Tomaž Zaman is working on something similar, an open source router. The process of building both the product and the company is well documented on his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@tomazzaman/featured. The company website is here: https://mono.si/
Why is there no contact form?
I don’t care for dd wrt.
I’ll put FreeBSD or openbsd on it. Was curious what the actual hardware chipsets were so I could check compatibility.
IIRC they have a FreeBSD fork already - Well, they have OPNsense running on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSZYNP41xqA
The website seems a bit barebones indeed, but it does list the processor used: NXP Layerscape LS1046A. The youtube channel links to discord/email, so he's probably reachable there.
I used to use dd-wrt, but I later settled on ASUS routers, and installing "ASUS Merlin" firmware on them.
I find ASUS hardware high quality in general. And using an open-source project like ASUS Merlin means the pain-points and limitations that I would face with stock firmware have been resolved to (at least to satisfactory extent) when I need reach for the hacker type configurations.
Same journey for me. Merlin does everything I need, and it's actively developed. They drop support for older devices too quickly, but everyone in the software industry seems to drop older devices as soon as new ones hit the market so they're no worse.
Yep I also share the frustrations with ASUS Merlin dropping support for older devices too quickly. Probably my biggest criticism of the project.
While it is good to have choice in commercial routers I haven't used one for a long time, instead running a virtual router on the same machine (an ex-lease DL380 G7, these have 4 ethernet ports) which hosts all services. I use a number of commercial Wifi-equipped routers as access points, these all have OpenWRT installed and all routing functionality is disabled. There's a managed 24-port switch in between the DL380 and the outside world which gets fed VLANs and separated these out into individual ports for specific hardware - printers etc. - and some of the commercial Wifi-routers also split out VLANs to their switch ports which connect to specific devices like solar inverters etc. Everything is built around OpenWRT, this includes the virtual router which is based on an X64 OpenWRT image running under ProxMox. The whole setup has been running for about 7 years now without any significant problems.
I buy hardware from a us provider ( thinkpenguin), who have something like this, and from a european provider (turris) who also do. It is a potential business with discriminating customers. If the goal is dd-wrt, I would banish the thought of anything near mass market (Walmart/Best Buy)- you have to be doing millions of units to even get into that conversation and dd-wrt is not the vehicle to sell to millions. But if you are looking for opportunity, local llm friendly home device integration of which the edge router is a small part, and of which dd-wrt is irrelevant, is a big wide open space.
I'd like a reliable and inexpensive router with OpenWrt.
It's a difficult market though:
- Vast majority people use router provided by ISP. - Some unhappy with ISP hardware quality buy whatever they find online (in my country usually TP-Link devices) - Enthusiasts flash OpenWrt on cheap devices, home servers or buy MikroTik devices (or similar). - Non enthusiasts, but caring about quality and support still have some good (but more expensive) devices to pick from like Fritz!Box in Europe
People wanting pre-flashed OpenWrt will be fraction of a fraction of overall market, so you'd need to charge a lot, which puts you in direct competition with options above.
Glinet routers are already this.
Buy https://www.gl-inet.com/en-us/products/gl-mt3600be and move on with your life.
Alternately, what's the problem you're trying to solve? Who are your potential customers? Why do existing options in the market not address their needs?
There is basically no market for this. The set of humans who want a turnkey DD-WRT-type solution is functionally nonexistent. The target audience for this is people who won’t actually tinker with it but want to imagine they would. Anyone who would actually tinker with it doesn’t need it preinstalled.
Dropbox is an odd comparison because it’s not the hacker solution at all. The market for Dropbox is indeed normal folks who do not want to tinker. They want it to just work. (I buy Ubiquiti because I want it to just work.)
I assure you, this market exists. I own a RaspberryPi and have never once used it. In fact, I know several people who own several RaspberryPis and don't use them!
Kind of. There is certainly a market for aspirational tinkerers. There are people who would (and do) buy routers to install stock DD-WRT and run them basically unchanged. But that market is small and already saturated. I can type “best routers to use with DD-WRT” into Google and get a list of options that cover all price points already. Most of the options aren’t even competing directly for that narrow market but they support custom flashing so they saturate the market incidentally.
Comparing to Raspberry Pi, the analogous question would be “is there a market for Raspberry Pi with Pi OS already flashed onto a memory card”? And the answer is not much. Someone preflashing a stock image doesn’t provide much if any value.
Someone starting a new router company better have more of a value proposition than just “I’ll preinstall DD-WRT for you”.
I don't think it will work as a business. The people who want dd-wrt will just install it themselves, not pay additional for it to already be installed. However, I do think you may be able to sell an ad-blocking router with ad-blocking already installed. I think people may consider that enough of a feature to pay for.
Agree - the firmware is never really a selling point. But a shop built around routers could have a few angles:
1) Privacy/ ad-protection native (as you say)
2) High security and performance (fully tuned DD-WRT). Even solving bufferbloat for end users would be amazing - the world is barely catching up on that.
3) Good software add-ons that aren't proprietary junk. Asset management/upgrade, sign-in/landing pages, monitoring and trafffic shaping that holds up, etc.
Bunlding FOSS to solve these problems well, even on some else's hardware, does seem like work, and work can be charged for.
I think the comment above is the winner here.
Back in the day I probably modded over 100 consoles for people, Xbox, Wii, DS, Switch, PS3.... I can't say that even once the person cared about hearing what XBMC was and all the things it could theoretically do. They just cared about being able to play/watch things with the press of the button without having to know any of the tech aspects.
Anyone I knew that could mod consoles just did it themselves.
Yep, this is what I want.
Also I want it to auto-detect spyware/adware and isolate/neutralize it, even to the point of spoofing harmless responses.
Like I would love it if it were possible to proxy all traffic and load certs to do ssl interception if that were possible on household devices.
Or at minimum just let me safely connect locally to “smart” devices without them sending data out.
Basically just tron let loose on my home network fighting for the user.
Trusting a third party / router seller to set up SSL interception for your entire house doesn't sound sensible.
If it's open source maybe?
I got two GL.Inet devices:
- Flint 2: very happy with this. I can do any kind of OpenWRT setting I want
- Flint 3: super unhappy!! changing VLAN settings breaks the entire router.
Why? Flint 3 uses a chip with encrypted vendor blob (Qualcomm) and Gl.inet just hacked the drivers in a way is not compatible with OpenWRT.
But maybe I should let an agent reverse engineer the driver and add correct support myself?
Edit: i haven't checked the status in a while, but seems like last months support for this device changed a lot.
Update: Yes!!! VLANs are up and running.
What I really want and haven't seen is a proper mesh router setup that runs DD-WRT or something open-source. In bigger homes really a mesh system is your best hope since your internet access usually comes in on a corner somewhere, but I really don't trust any of the options I have (with the possible exception of one, whose name escapes me at the moment).
In bigger homes your best bet is to find a way to run Ethernet. My experience with mesh was mediocre to bad and I feel like that’s what I hear from everyone else who tries it.
Running ethernet over the whole home is an expensive job, may not even be realistic depending on the home's construction, and definitely isn't possible if you're renting. It's not perfect and not as good as ethernet for sure, but it's better than using a single router.
It really is, but you will still want wifi, so you need a team of internet connected wifi points with central control, which play nicely with each other. I have use Ubiquiti in the past. Is there an open source version of what they do?
GL.iNet is more open (they run an OpenWRT fork that they open source with a proprietary GUI on top). They have a beta for a mesh system on top of that: https://www.gl-inet.com/en-us/pages/mesh . I haven't tried the mesh, but I have had very good experiences with a few of their routers and they are what I recommend to friends.
Ubiquiti mesh stuff works very well and is an overall polished experience. Supposedly their APs are at least distantly descended from OpenWRT but they are not open source. Their platform is pretty open in terms of integrating with other stuff and not locking you in, at least.
I switched to ubiquiti because it just works.
+1 I put as much as I can on wired ethernet. The WiFi is mostly for laptops & phones. I have a couple of APs (OpenWRT) that aren't meshed but I run 802.11r on them.
You're approaching this from the wrong angle it's not the technology in the router average people are buying. They care about ease of use, reliability, and features. In that order. Dropbox won because it provided rsync in an easy to understand product. If ddwrt allows you to build features into routers that have good UX for average people then you win. What would those features be? That's the work you should be doing
Off the top of my head. A mobile app for setting up and remotely monitoring and controlling my home network. Pihole/pivpn built in with wireguard and a good UX for creating tunnels. Host isolation. A local llm that I can ask questions and get fixed (why can't I print to the printer from my laptop on ssid1. Fix it). Kid friendly things for parents. Easy kid schedules and device groups to limit screen time and reports on what sites they visited.
Ubiquitis amplifi app had a decent mobile app with some of these things.
Go after the product not the technology.
I would pay if I could get an openwrt router that was already set up with features like
- ad-blocking
- kid network vs grown-up network vs guest network
- blocking sites (on kid network), with easy way to temporarily disable or disable on a schedule
- safe and regular updates from openwrt, that I can trust will work even if your company goes bust (ie. your layer on top needs to play well with upstream)
(but I'm in Europe so might not be your customer)
> So, do you actually want a router that you can buy with DD-WRT pre-installed?
No, I'd rather flash it myself and use OpenWrt instead of DD-WRT.
Availability of an OpenWrt port is the first thing I check when looking for network hardware :)
IMHO, those who want a router with open-source firmware are going to have the technical knowledge to do the finding and flashing themselves, by virtue of being embedded in tech deeply enough to recognize the value of an open-source firmware in the first place.
Those who look at you blankly when you mention open-source router firmware aren’t likely going to become customers.
You would be surprised at how many people that know enough to be curious but are not ready to jump straight into flashing custom firmware yet. I've seen people sell pre-flashed wired and wireless routers like this for years on platforms like EBay. I think there's already a niche there, even if it's small.
I'm not sure how approachable tools like Claude Code have made this for people though. If I was just getting started, I would probably just have the tool do it for me.
I know how to flash firmware, but I'd still rather buy routers that have open-source firmware pre-flashed and tested by the vendor. This is simply because I've often run into issues with OpenWrt. I once bought a bunch of Archer C7s because it was described as a good router for OpenWrt, only to discover dmesg full of crashes from the proprietary wireless firmware running on the 5Ghz chip. In another case, I learned long after installing OpenWrt that the performance was much worse than stock firmware because OpenWrt didn't support hardware routing offload.
DD-WRT doesn't upgrade the Linux kernel in the device you flash it to - this is what enables it to use the closed-source drivers that A) require a specific Linux kernel version and B) are typically a Broadcom thing. You're still getting a more stable and performant device in most cases but not necessarily a more secure one or one with newer kernel features. So I prefer OpenWRT and devices that allow OpenWRT to fully work.
> I would buy a low-power SFF PC with dual NICs, run OPNsense or OpenWrt, and use the wireless routers strictly as access points.
If you can fish an old PC with a few GB of RAM made since 2006 or so out of the trash, you're halfway there. Get a cheap 32GB SSD and a second PCIe NIC off of Amazon, and go for it. You can run OpenWRT on x86.
Wouldn’t trust it at this point … but what I would trust is a blank router that has a GitHub repo with a containerized build that I could run on my own machine and something ai ish that lets me flash it :)
Would be legit to be able to have an Llm do a source audit before installing …. Not perfect but damn sure better than nothing
Check out TekLager. They're Swedish, and I've bought a router from them before - excellent build quality. I think they make or made several themselves, possibly from pre-existing designs (unsure how open source the hardware is.) They can come pre-installed with various open source OSes.
https://teklager.se/en/
Not affiliated, just a happy customer. If you're thinking of getting in a similar business and are not a competitor in Sweden, drop them a line. When I spoke to them they were very friendly.
I did build my own router, two actually, but opted into buying one of the Deciso appliances with OPNSense pre-installed for the main WAN connection from my house to the ISP upstream.
The biggest reason I did that is that I wanted four ports, not two, and I could not find a mini-ITX motherboard or any other commodity form factor with four ports built-in. Once you have to add an expansion card, you need a case quite a bit larger than what you're used to for a home network appliance.
That's an underfilled niche, small form factor single boards with more than two high-speed NICs, but presumably it's underfilled for a reason, which is there aren't many individual consumers, as opposed to third-party packagers like Deciso who sell appliances to enterprises, who want these. The other consideration is server-grade mini-ITX boards that have even two onboard NICs have a whole lot of other features not needed in a networking appliance that end up consuming more power than is ideal. If you could offer such boards, with or without a case, with or without a pre-installed operating system, I'd definitely be interested, but I'm one guy. Don't build a business on scratching the itch of notoriously stingy homelab enthusiasts. We're the kind of people who will gladly pay $400 a week on groceries and then scoff at a $10 a year software subscription as something unconscionable.
Well, I just bought a:
https://www.gl-inet.com/en-de/products/gl-be14000
so.. yes? I haven't gotten around to flashing stock openwrt on it - but I probably will at some point - seems to be supported now?
https://forum.gl-inet.com/t/flint-4-openwrt-vanilla/71383/10
I think it would be difficult to compete with existing offerings - even though they are quite few.
You need to remind yourself that the overwhelming majority of populace are not HN users. Most just want a cheap "internet box" that gives them WiFi. If any had interest in going deeper into networking, they would build a router themselves. But if you had some extra unique features on top of DD-WRT, that might turn a few heads. I do recall Tomaz Zaman on Youtube building their own router completely from scratch - not saying it's 100% what you plan on doing, just a reference point for you to look at.
Yes, but ...
I run a GL.inet, which is generally great. Though I sometimes wonder about trust, the logistic side of things, etc, in a Snowden sense.
I had been running an xfinity router*, which received an update blocking admin access without using a phone app. That was a red line. I also did not want to take the chance of borking a supposedly compatible router, and wasn't really into researching and gambling; so finding gl.inet was a big relief. The default admin login is crap though. There is no password. This is not super substantial in itself, but the eccentric initial connection process is often broken, and can take dozens or more attempts, and in my case, it was dozens. No reset fixes it either -- it's design.
* I reluctantly confess this
I want it, in the same way I want a laptop with Linux. I can install it myself, and I already have done, but I wish the option was viable for most others, so that more of the market is open source.
For routers, the only realistic way that can happen is by getting some big vendor to adopt ddwrt or openwrt to offload (some of) the job of writing the firmware. And even then, most people use their ISP provided router. A niche vendor supplying preflashed routers isn't going to make a dent.
If you had asked me 10 or 15 years ago, yes. At some point I decided I am happy enough with a FritzBox (maybe also because of the included modem, so less devices) for home use - and then added 2 of the cheaper mikrotik devices.
I think there is a market, but it's small. I would absolutely not replace my setup now after spending some money just this year. Had this offer existed last year, maybe (but I have also thought about a Turris Omnia in the past...)
Disclaimer: I have used DD-WRT, OpenWRT, Tomato and for the sake of this argument, they're interchangeable to me. Something FLOSS that I can configure, but I've not even checked what the market provides for many years.
At this point it’s generally cheaper for the things I want (10G/2.5G ports; frequent security updates; advanced routing including site to site VPNs; very fast boot times; ability to have two redundant routers) to simply have an old PC where I can control those things.
There are some Chinese companies making more open router dev boards like Banana Pi R4. You can install openwrt out of the box. But generally, the SoCs that power the current generation of routers are locked down / highly proprietary (and always have been). It's the chips, not the boards, which matter most.
Dropbox had basically no competition at the time as the idea of cloud files was barely in the market.
Meanwhile, home routers with meshing and security and built-in cloud management planes with easy apps are already cheap.
What would your pitch be when mom & dad would probably just stumble on Amazon Eero or Netgear Orbi? Someone already brought fire back to the home market, you can't differentiate if you're just putting up a site and a device, unless you hit some absurd low-$ cost in an already low-margin industry.
You'd be better off looking for a niche or industry where the edges are sharp, the tooling is bad or inconsistent, and there's no clear winner.
> Do you want a router that has DD-WRT pre-installed?
No, not really. I build my own routers using commodity hardware and Debian. If I had to go back to consumer hardware, I would get a GL.Inet or other off-the-shelf router that supports OpenWrt and flash it.
Explain commodity hardware, you mean a generic x86 with an asic card? Or a whitebox router?
It's an ordinary x86 PC with a dual NIC. It's more than a router though, I also host all types of servers on it (email, Web, Podman host, various games). It does not break a sweat.
DD-WRT isn't open-source though. OpenWRT is.
What part of it isn't open source?
Ages ago you could download binaries for Buffalo routers (g300nh / g300nh2) and flash it through the web ui. If you tried to build those images yourself, though, it would fail at the final step because the signing tools / keys were only in the possession of BrainSlayer / Sebastian. Other platforms relied on binary blobs for wlan drivers, and things like that.
Out of the two of them DD-WRT is more "hacky" and duct-taped together, while OpenWrt is more "pure". This can mean that DD-WRT feels more feature complete at times.
Buffalo shipped the WZR series routers with DD-WRT. But they stopped making them when the FCC restricted router firmware about a decade ago.
I bought a pair of them at the time. Kept one (N600) until I needed a 'mesh' and sold it on eBay about four years ago. Replaced it with an Orbi system that doesn't need to phone home (not sure such things are still available in the consumer market).
The ones that I had came with Buffalo firmware but you could load DD-WRT on them through the web ui. To load OpenWrt you had to use tftp and catch it during boot.
I ended up adding support for the G300NH2 model for OpenWrt.
The differences between open wrt and dd wrt didn’t matter to me. I just wanted more control.
The only time I’ve installed OpenWRT was on my WRT54G, which was in service until it was replaced by one of the Buffalo WZR’s.
DD-WRT specifically includes drivers/firmware blobs that OpenWRT can't/doesn't. Mostly broadcom stuff afaik.
I'd only be interested in a platform I could trust completely, with no proprietary firmware or software blobs required. Short of that, if I have to trust someone, I'm probably just going to trust Cisco or Ubiquiti given they're western and have been around for a while with a relatively good track record and a lot of money to lose if they're found to have been negligent or malicious.
I think there's a market there for a fully open platform, but it's probably not very easy to pull off given how secretive the chip vendors seem to be.
It would be great if you had with proper HW acceleration and same performance as non openwrt FW.
And lastly ideally Qualcomm or Broadcom SoC and not mediatek
I just bought a used Extreme Networks AP that shipped with OpenWRT installed. I appreciated the convenience of something that was partly done before I got it.
It's currently serving as a wireless bridge client for a network of 10 IP cameras.
I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but I think that routers are a pretty geeky thing that most people don't want to hear about. I had offered to buy and set up a pfsense router for my parents for a few years ago and they were decidedly not interested, even after I tried explaining the merits of it. Pretty much anyone who is going to be interested in DD-WRT is going to be someone who can set it up themselves.
pfsense can sell for a relatively high price, I think, because they market themselves more towards businesses and big corporations.
Normies would rather just use the router that their ISP provides, or get a Google / Apple mesh network.
Honestly you often don’t even have a choice they don’t even give you a modem that does ppoe pass through or bridge mode.
Right, because 99% of their customer base does not care. TikTok and YouTube work without "bridge mode," as does Fortnight / Roblox / Minecraft. Any random Comcast or AT&T Fiber subscriber on the street won't be able to tell you what "bridge mode" does.
I used to use pfsense and openwrt and stuff but now with Claude I just use a custom Linux distribution running on a dell 2u. That being said I have 25 gbps of internet across 5 internet providers (puerto Rico) and that plugs into my internal home network running at 2x 25 gbps . So for savings it’s like two quad 10 gbps cards. I’ve found substantial speed advantages via consumer hardware considering the cross sectional bandwidth is like 70 gbps
Already have one, bought from a local Swedish store that flashes things like OpnSense and Dd-wrt on devices they sell.
The most important thing here is the price and with a low volume you would never hit the low price per unit.
And the person which knows what DD-WRT is knows where and how to get it for a good (for them) price.
So you target audience is already has their needs fulfilled and you don't add any additional value worth the increased price.
Don't you just launch a good router? Some people will be attracted by the open source firmware. Some will be attached by a good router. You will be attracted by not having to write firmware.
Another way of looking at this, find an industry or community that have particular needs in a router and sell to them
The OpenWrt One is really not a great piece of hardware. No 6GHz, and only two Ethernet ports, one of which is only 1Gbit. The latest GL.iNet products are apparently better, but also apparently don't run stock OpenWrt, only a fork of it. In other words, there's still plenty of room in the market for good routers with open-source firmware.
Probably because the cutting edge hardware doesn't have open enough drivers.
I'll tell you what i wouldn't get - if you have an asus router, i'd steer clear of merlin
They leave a bunch of data sharing options built in and on by default with no warning, acknowledgement, etc and I suspect it's why asus lets the project continue to run
Interesting related question -- I recently inherited several WiFI AP/Routers that are openwrt or DDWRT compatible. Are there any packages that folks are working on, or know of that can centrally manage a fleet of them?
If there wasn't, I was going to use this as a project to explore vibecoding...
Happy OPNsense user here, with no current plans to change. Ruckus unleashed + brocade ICX treat me very well. The all-in-one router indeed are only access points to me, and I don't exactly wish 'only having an AIO router' on people.
No, I'd just do it myself with a trusted image, and save myself some money.
Been using an OpenWrt from ebay, BT Hub, with vdsl, for more than 5 years, rock solid, will probably look for an upgrade soon
Would definetly try DD-WRT also
I generally prefer vanilla OpwnWRT or maaaaaaybe one of the nicer Tomato forks.
There's a Hong Kong company called GL-iNet which makes routers whose OEM firmware is just OpenWRT plus their own web interface, but they actually also have the stock one from upstream pre-installed as well.
I've bought routers from them for years. I usually make sure that they're fully supported in a stable upstream release of OpenWRT, then replace the firmware with vanilla, which is no fuss. Then they continue to get firmware upgrades for many years.
DD-WRT I think of as a messy thing for backporting as many features as possible to routers that are locked to old kernels because they rely on super proprietary radio firmware blobs.
Take a look at GL-iNet, the WRT routers from Linksys, and the OpnWRT One or whatever it was, and try to figure out where you might fit in that landscape. Maybe you can support some features they don't, maybe you can take a radical upstream-first approach to appeal to free software enthusiasts, or maybe you can market to Americans who want manufacturer based in their own country. But those are antecedents who may also be your competitors, so it's with seeing what they're doing.
I have GL-iNet Flint (MT6000) - absolutely delightful piece of hardware. I really love it. Having the flexibility of OpenWRT is a serious boon.
I have an old Flint and a newer Flint 2, plus a handful of travel routers that I use as wireless Ethernet bridges to get reliable pseudo-wired connections in my house without running cables. (Those can be really handy for devices that are a pain to configure even if they do have wifi, like printers.)
I wouldn't buy any of their stuff if not for OpenWRT— that's the killer feature for me. But I'm quite happy with quality and features from GL-iNet as well. I recommend them to everyone.
DD-WRT? Absolutely fucking not.
Brainslayer is (and has been) a complete nutjob for decades. To say DD-WRT is an "open source" project is stretching things to breaking point.
To get a device "supported" by DD-WRT you have to send Brainslayer a router. Nobody else can build the project because he intentionally obfuscates and breaks the build process as much as possible to "prevent people from selling DD-WRT" (as you're proposing doing here)
Once he receives it. He simply takes the vendor GPL firmware tarball and glues DD-WRT's UI onto it. There's no improved security for a DD-WRT device. Particularly the Broadcom ones back in the late 2000's/early 2010's when DD-WRT was more popular, Brainslayer never bothered to update from the 2.6.18 kernels the devices came with which left the Wi-Fi performance absolutely lacking.
OpenWRT is a completely different bet. But then you're fighting with GL.iNet who are literally a Taiwanese OEM selling OpenWRT-out-of-the-box devices
I don't think that's the best idea for starting a business. Demand is too low, and the required investment is too high.
Thinkpenguin used to sell Rosewill routers that came with a particular Linux installed, but their value add was no proprietary blobs, everything open source and FSF certified IIRC.
I want a router that doesnt come with Open-WRT or DD-WRT flashed, but releases their chipset drivers for full compatibility if I want to flash myself.
DD-wrt is not a free software, and they sell licenses on their website. Does its license allows redistribution and/or selling the routers?
There are a few that support DD-WRT out of the box, but the greater opportunity is in bringing open source firmware to everyone!
"So, do you actuallly want a router with DD-WRT pre-installed?"
I bought a router with no OS pre-installed
I chose Coreboot to be pre-installed as a convenience
I prefer to boot from USB stick or the network; there's no secondary storage, only max amount of RAM, no Wifi
The computer is sold as a "router". But for me any computer that runs a kernel I have enabled to forward packets is a "router" and any "router" is a computer I can use for any purpose (within the limits of the hardware)
Yes, or open Wrt
yes but i want it to function as a software defined radio too. https://github.com/h0m3us3r/w1700k-sdr
also it better be open hardware.
sign me up take my money. jae@gnomail.io
> do you actually want a router that you can buy with DD-WRT pre-installed?
I don't think many people particularly care that their router has DD-WRT installed, and I also think you're asking the wrong question. Many people just want their network hardware and software to be fast and reliable. I know when I flashed DD-WRT onto my old Linksys router back in the day, it wasn't for any philosophical reason: it was that the default software was hot garbage, I didn't have the money to buy a new router, and DD-WRT promised to fix some of the problems I was running into.
(And yeah, there are _some_ people who really, really want DD-WRT on their router. They probably aren't your target customer unless you're also selling hardware that is cheaper and better than whatever they can acquire and flash themselves)
I am a very very happy GL.iNet customer, and probably have 10+ of their devices.
Not particularly to be honest, I'm fine with the one my ISP gave me
Many stock Firmware is just OpenWRT with fancy interface. I remember Asus being one.
Yes I do. And also RouterOS seems good alternate for me
Wow, the timing of this question is eerie. Just last week, I got tired of talking about segmenting my network but never doing it. So I did some research, asked some friends, and settled on the following:
* An Opnsense firewall (purchased from Deciso; ie: "official" hardware)
* An OpenWRT One (ie: "official" hardware) to be used as an access point
* A Microtik switch (SW OS, not Router OS)
My plan is to create multiple SSIDs, have each one on a different vlan, and then control services provided to that vlan. For example, I'll dump all IOT crap onto a vlan that doesn't have internet access.
I'm still not 100% sure it will work (the hardware still hasn't arrived). But finally, to answer your question: "Yes!"
Holy crap, give me official hardware. I installed DD-WRT on my linsys router. It's been so long that I don't remember exact details, but the process was INTIMIDATING. I felt like I had to download a blob from a website that wasn't the official website (ie: I seem to recall different people building DD-WRT for different hardware). I also recall some features not being available on some hardware.
Give me the hardware that is sold by the people that work on the project!
I want some reassurance that I have the "most supported hardware", so I don't have to go through huge feature matrices to see if my hardware supports feature X.
I want headroom to install new packages. I don't want to have so little space that I need to remove one package to install another.
And finally, I want the people writing the software to GET PAID, because I want it to still be around... and being actively developed 10 years from now.
PS:
I initially wanted to get a consumer grade switch, but my network operator friends told me that was a terrible idea... and that I should get a use Cisco switch on Ebay. Cisco is probably great and network operators love it... but holy crap... trying to figure out what switch to buy is an enormous pain in the a$$. I pushed my friends, they relented and said: "Mikrotik is also great". I went to their website. 1000 times better than Cisco's; their switches were cheaper. I didn't have to "call for a quote" or scour Ebay. I haven't turned it on yet, but the buying experience was so much better.
I'm currently running OPNSense on one of those small N95 devices as a Virtual Machine, as my primary router/firewall and DHCP server for my (recently setup) handful of VLANs.
Whilst I have backups of the VM itself, as well as backups of the OPNSense configuration at various different times, one of the things I'd like to have is a cheap, drop-in device that is able to do all those same things. Having a hardware device that runs OpenWRT to do this would, as far as I can tell, be perfect for this, since OpenWRT's configuration can be backed up and applied to another device (I'm sure there are some traps for young players in regards to interface names etc. but I'm also sure they're not insurmountable). So any device that can run OpenWRT that has the hardware capacity to keep up with my setup, is drop-in-able.
An additional benefit of this is that the same / similar configurations can be deployed to various friends and family for both secure networks and relatively quick, easy, and cheap replacement in the event of hardware failure.
... and possibly sellable as a device and / or service. Basically cheap option: OpenWRT on compatible off-the-shelf device, expensive option: OPNSense VM on mini PC.
I got this idea too. To sell the openwrt preinstalled routers.
I'm happy enough with my GL.iNet router.
maybe preinstalled but easily able to overwrite with a downloaded version from dd-wrt as no one should trust preinstalled firmware on these devices.
The openwrt ones are usually better.
Nope. I want one with OpenWRT
also
> 4. used terminal PC, they go for cheap. Just add ethernet usb card for second link
also
> 5. plenty of small form factor multiple ethernet boards you can get on ARM and even x86, tho gonna be more expensive than a dedicated router
> ethernet usb card
Are you serious? It's going to ruin the performance or efficiency.
No, because I wouldn't trust it not to be messed with. I want it to run DD-WRT, but I'll flash it with DD-WRT myself.
Yes. With upgradable radios.
How does DD-WRT compare to RouterOS?
they're entirely different beasts. dd-wrt is more or less a normal linux distro that targets embedded devices. it has a "unified config" that abstracts away configs for many packages, but those abstractions are leaky. when you log in by ssh, you're using a shell and editor to edit config files.
compared with RouterOS where the Linux bits are almost completely hidden behind the proprietary config engine (and the proprietary cli and webuis that power that config engine). for the most part with routeros, you'd be hard pressed to know that you're even on a unix let alone linux.
As the other commenter said - but if you loved IOS before it was iOS you’ll find routeros comfortable if different, if you like rc.d you’ll like DD-WRT.
All my routers run TOMATO
get a gl.inet router
they are not prohibitively expensive and have a version of openwrt installed
if anything, you are sure to be able to install openwrt on them yourself
if you get good at openwrt you can install it on other parts of your home network like the zyxel gs1900 series switches for up to 48 ports
the reason not to install off-the-shelf consumer routers is privacy, security and enshittification
I'd love that!
opnsense or openwrt, sure.
I want a router with a secure real-time microkernel operating system.
I'm so disappointed everyone is just slapping an insecure Linux kernel on their devices and calling it a day.
I used to use DD-WRT, and Tomato, and Shibby's mod of Tomato, and Advanced Tomato, and other stuff. Somewhere, I'm sure I still have a WRT54GS that I hacked ~20 years ago to accept SD cards. It was a fun time in using inexpensive hardware in unintended ways.
At one point, and I don't remember exactly when, I just started using OpenWRT instead. It wasn't always the case, but it presents a very usable GUI straight away these days and it has a ton of flexibility for getting creative later.
At home I run it on a Pi4 that I bought for the purpose. It keeps up with my 500/20Mbps DOCSIS internet very well indeed. I've used it with a USB NIC to get dedicated ports, and also with VLANs and a managed switch instead. I just download and flash the card, plug stuff in, and configure it. No real issues -- for years, now. (Wireless is provided by Mikrotik access points.)
When something faster happens in my neighborhood (which may be very soon; I had a very brief chat with a dude whose fiber splicing trailer was parked across the street just yesterday), I'll probably want to move to something more capable.
That could be in the form of faster Pi, or an old PC running OPNsense -- or even stick with OpenWRT. No big deal.
If I really wanted a tidier package for light-weight travel or something, then I guess I'd pick something appropriate from glinet and put an official OpenWRT image on it.
For heavier-travel, I've got a kit with a Pi4, a managed PoE switch, and a backup Mikrotik box (that can be a switch or a router; it runs OpenWRT as well and the normal config is that it just provides more switch ports), and all this stuff is mounted onto a 1U rack shelf that is in-turn inside of a road case. It's meant to be physically durable and to include enough gear that if any part of it dies then I can replace that functionality Right Now without spending time finding parts in the middle of nowhere.
So, no: I would not buy one that was prefabulated. It wouldn't scratch my itch.
---
For everyone else? Honestly, the regular folks I know who ask me questions about networking aren't into that stuff at all or they wouldn't be asking. They don't care about ultimate speeds, or latency under load, or any of those things. They don't care about running Internet services from their network, or services on their local network, and probably don't even have a printer to abuse if something goes awry. They're also not interested in exploring the bowels of their home to install cabling for PoE access points.
They just want decent-enough wifi coverage that they don't have to think about it, and then: They want to succeed at not thinking about it.
So for those folks, I've come to recommend proprietary multi-node mesh systems. It doesn't really matter to me which one it is, or how terrible some aspect or other is: They all tend to check the right boxes, they update themselves, and then: Nobody thinks about them.
50/50
This is not a new idea.
Several companies/single owner LLC's do this for a massively inflated price.
I understand why the inflated price, support and warranties, etc.
IT is not that hard for people who are technically inclined.
People who are not into it don't understand why.
If placement/marketing was for SMB that wanted to maximize dd-wrt usage and get a support contract in place I can see that
but outside of that, and a marketing youtube channel and being proactive on reddit, Idk how much can it scale and what point will you not get a cease and desist from vendors because I'm sure they have something nasty in their terms of service, which I think you may need to click through to enable the flash.
You've identified your market competiton price points, and all have deeper pockets than you, but do not offer free, open source software.
WRT3200ACM and the other previous model is a fab of mine to grab, it's been a year but I've collected 10+ and deploeyd them in strategic places for personal use,
You wouldn't need regulatory approval IMO. prototyping, what type? You'd follow the release schedule, get the best flavors/models and support those.
Overtime maybe you'd contribute back to the project, especially during hardware revisions. But it is very different from buying used hardware from ebay and flashing it to resell vs buying new and selling it as a value add on.
1. Yes, proper hacker route.
2. Proper route to an extent, it legitmiazes support, warranty and security.
3. Expensive, time consuming but, doable but not likely.
Yeah, the dropbox comment is infamous, but that was about launching a new SAAS that has infinite potential scale and solved a problem no one really wanted to fix at the time outside of one drive (which sucked at the time, was called skydrive afaik) and usb sticks which are...great but USB3 was new, usb2 was there and people were arguing back and forth why usb3 wasn't working or such
so:
to answer your question you need to really figure out a basic marketing question of 3 P's.
Product Price Placement.
Product is DD-WRT. Price: It's free. Placement: People that know what it is but don't have free time to install it?
No, not quite right, right? Let's try again:
Product: DD-WRT routers preconfigured for enterprise support and SMB. Price: Retail price of router + $100 per sold, with 1 yr warranty, additional warranty and stuff available at x and y? Placement: People that know what it is about but don't have free time ot install it or want to offshore this for a price.
Slightly better, but still:
So do I want it? I welcome anything FOSS in general w/ GNU/Linux and its a much needed stepping stone to continue having a decentralized internet:
but if it was so easy, people would've done it already, and they do.
It also reminds me of fontana which is how I netted a free WRT54G for offering what exactly, I don't know, but boy did I flash DD-wrt on that badboy and link it to my neighbors WiFi for free roadrunner internet to get my anime fansubs. So while as much as I'd like for the idea to flourish/am surprised wardriving and torrenting anime was a vector for getting me into tech I don't see it much out of a hobby business
and that is 100% OK
If you throw $5-10k a year at it, I think you can corner the niche, use AI automaiton for marketing campaigns, target tech conventions/festivals (like VCF) and youtube to build a audience it can scale.
but 125k? wow, no way - you ccan really do this for much less.
back to the scope of a opensource router: same as above, but if you really want, you need to find a manufacturer that already has a pre built configuration that at minimum supports the newest radio and minimum gigabit ethernet. GLI has theirs at $169, and hardware is a miminmal markup business, you can really find something similar to that and do a proper hardware cycle with a manufacturer and somewhat a contract but thats 50K including FCC licensing (if you know what to do, and you do the licensing yoruself, as well as Electrek/uL to cover CSPC. But hey, in todays world, everyone (well for past 30 years too) just makes it up and folds thier llc when caught.
For more business minded ideas, heres one about MSO/s and GLP1 from a Ycombinator 3x foudner and I comment with the same dissent:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49543849
So tl;dr why not pitch it for ycombinator winter, I think it's still open for submissions.
Add AI (why not, right?) and you can have a walking talking configuratuion wizard guide you to addung ublock,adblock, pihole, etc instead of the broken ecosystem we have today within dd-wrt because while I clearly can spot the pain points and issues, I lack the ability to turn them into viable selling points for investors to give me money and I should fix that someday :(
Ddwrt is a joke today. I would pay to have it go away forever or finally become mature and not be forever in beta.