That's not quite how I see it. Untangle Home Protect Basic still costs $50 per year and it gets you pretty much everything except Threat Protection (IDS/IPS), full BitDefender AntiVirus and WireGuard. Everything else is there and fully working - even BitDefender Lite.
Then you can spend the extra $100 for Home Protect Plus and that gets you the full version of BitDefender, which is $30 from them, you get the IPS/IDS with Untangle's own lists as Suricata's are often less than fabulous and you get WireGuard VPN. But the $50 version is still there and works great for most people. You have OpenVPN, IPSec VPN as well as most of the commercial ones all baked in and ready to go. Literally just type your credentials in and they work.
Untangle is a great product. Not cheap, but I don't consider it to be expensive for what you get.
Context is everything, and the answer will be different for different people with different needs, nothing at all wrong with that. Would I miss $150/yr? Not really, I donate several times that each year to developers who make useful (free) software as if it saves me time and makes my life easier, it’s worth my money.
Am I OK with Untangle charging me $50/yr to save me a bit of time/agro? Yea sure, it’s a decent product with a nice feature set and easy to use. Do I object to additional premium features having an additional price? Not really. Unfortunately here’s where I go from being happy to subscribe at $50/yr to looking at other options: I don’t personally feel that IDS/IPS or full AV in this form is a must have for home users. It’s a nice box to tick for the full UTM experience, but it’s not a requirement or massively useful in my usage/opinion. Realistically the only reason I would be upgrading is Wg, and who is going to knowingly pay $100 to enable something they can spin up a docker image for in seconds for free? OK the management isn’t the same, but I can live with that, it’s OK if others can’t, your money, your choice, other options exist and let’s be honest, I probably have way more free time than most.
Going back to pfsense, I noticed someone posted this on Reddit.
https://www.theregister.com/2008/04/24/kip_macy_arrest/
https://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive...rrorizing-apartment-tenants/story?id=20875476
So yes, Netgate (who want us to trust them and intend to take Plus to closed source so no peer review is possible) found the best developer for the job and paid him to bring Wg to BSD. However it wasn’t just the standard of coding that was apparently criminal. Even ignoring the convictions, jail time, bail jumping, intentionally costing his mother $500K or the fact that he refers to an employee as ‘the Mexican’ and shows little or no remorse while seeking to blame his wife, this is who Netgate chose to represent them on behalf of its users. Even if he had done a decent job, this seems like a highly questionable hire. The last time I wanted to swerve a company/product this hard was when PIA hired Mark Karpeles as CTO.
