I've run Zenarmor for 5 years now, and I've decided to cancel my subscription (turned off auto-renewal). The form on the website only allows 200 characters, so wanted to lay out the reasoning properly here, partly as feedback, partly because I suspect other home/SOHO users are weighing the same trade-off.
The core issue is that the value-for-money for a non-commercial, single-site deployment has eroded over time. Each release seems to move more functionality behind premium tiers priced for businesses, not individuals. That's a reasonable strategy if the target market is enterprise, but it leaves home users increasingly squeezed: paying for capability that used to be standard, or going without.
The development roadmap also reads as enterprise-first. Centralized management, multi-tenant features, advanced reporting: all sensible for MSPs and larger deployments, but largely irrelevant to a single firewall at home.
What tipped this from "frustrating" to "not worth it" is multi-core support being restricted to paid subscriptions. For anyone running OPNsense on older or budget hardware, that's not a nice-to-have, it's the difference between Zenarmor being usable at all and pegging a single core under load. Gating it behind a premium plan effectively prices out the exact hardware profile where the feature matters most.
For context: as a home/SOHO user I've never minded being treated as a kind of beta tester. I appreciate the direct line to the developers through the forum and email, and genuinely enjoy contributing to the product's development. That's actually what makes this decision sting more than a simple price complaint would: paying for what is, in practice, a deliberately limited version of the product feels at odds with that relationship.
I don't doubt the engineering effort behind the product, and I understand a company needs a sustainable business model. But the current tiering no longer makes sense for my use case, so I'll be switching back to a lighter inline IDS/IPS setup. Curious whether others here have reached the same conclusion or found a tier that still works for home use.
I don't have a paid subscription but I was at the start very willing to be helpful and was engaged with their support team to help them help me diagnose problems and in return they got to improve their product. It felt the fair tradeoff of being early user/tester for a free product. All as expected.
As time has gone by I am more and more disheartened with the trajectory so far taken, in that it feels now they've had our use, they can move to their paying market with a more mature product.
Again, not unexpected BUT as with the functionality gone that used to be free and the main one, multicore, exactly as you have clearly explained, has had me 1) wondering if it is still worth the machine's stress for what it gets 2) whether to stop using it.
It seems the balance against us is too uneven. The impression that they have taken without giving back to balance the scales a bit for us early testers is the more bitter one.
A similar thinking is growing with Crowdsec to be honest but this is not the place for this one.
So yes, same impressions, same fork in the road. No decision taken yet but feels close. I don't know yet what will replace it though.