Opnsense business

[Rakkdur]

Hey there,

I was wondering if you offer a lifetime deal for the BE edition, if so how much would it cost? Would love to support the community, and I have heard so many amazing things about BE.

[Greg_E]

That would be an interesting option, I'm doing 3 years at a time.

[franco]

You can contact sales AT deciso DOT com but I doubt a bit the security aspect of a perpetual subscription key that may get leaked or shared somewhere eventually. The built-in expiry helps both parties to check and make sure it's being used as intended.


Cheers,
Franco

[yourfriendarmando]

We'll check that out, or at least a 10 year, aligned with how often we renew domains etc.

[Rakkdur]

I will definitely reach out, I’m just bad at remembering bills and would spend the money for perpetual if I could so I can set it and forget it

[Rakkdur]

The official response from sales:

[Rakkdur]

Franco, this is not a attack on you or the development team but more in reference to sales, so first off I love opnsense and will most likely buy BE it’ would be helpful to many companies or end users to offer a perpetual plan and a 10 year plan, there are ways to avoid them from getting sent out and distributed. By limiting them to say 5 firewalls, this would allow the end user from sharing the key but giving companies the ability to apply their firewall to multiple servers. I would say also hope spend as much as some people do on deciso firewalls that you would give them a little more then a year, when you compare your products to say some other competitor, it would make sense to give them the BE edition for free. These are just some options and ideas I am just giving some feedback as a users thought.

[mooh]

From my point of view the business license would be more attractive if its duration was more inline with expected device life time. For example, if a company replaces their server type hardware every N years, it would be great to purchase a N year license with Deciso hardware, so businesses don't need to worry about licensing extensions.

Unlimited licenses only make sense when business requirements never change, i.e.rarely. Maybe there's a far superior product available with the next hardware generation. Why pay extra for a perpetual license?

[franco]

There are some things to consider here in reference to what is being discussed:

1. If we assume 149 EUR per year cost that's 13,30 USD per month. That's less than an ad-free Netflix or Disney Plus just for reference. If that's cheap for you or expensive heavily depends on whether you are a home or business user and where in the world you are. Low income countries are of course going to be turned off by the pricing. Home users likely also are not a good fit for this pricing, but I wouldn't say it's expensive by western standards.

2. How much are other commercial offerings with central management? I don't think the business edition is one of the expensive ones. I wonder how many are actually cheaper.

3. You can use the license on any hardware, so effectively the hardware is free if you already have it or can salvage it.

4. The Deciso devices are expensive in comparison and this has been discussed a few times over the years. Yes you can get something cheap off Aliexpress, but try to find manufacturer that is in the EU and designs and assembles these locally and repairs your device if it has an issue... of course it's going to be noticeable in price. The business license for a year with the device is free. I don't believe there was an added cost to it so you could also consider it reasonable discount (that's 149 EUR free see point 1).

There may be other models and OPNsense versions in the future, but it's something that needs to be aligned with demand and a business plan.

That being said I appreciate the input on the subject. It will be (re)discussed in the future.


Cheers,
Franco

[Greg_E]

I'll disagree about the hardware pricing... The 27xx are pretty much right where I would expect to pay for a good modern Supermicro system with similar capabilities. My only concern is lack of RAM, I'd like to see the base at 16gb with maybe an option for 32gb. Or base at 8 and option to upgrade to 16 and 32 in the menus so it arrives ready to go. I just found that 8gb wasn't enough when I was testing, 16 was a comfortable spot which should leave decent overheard for a bunch of the paid Zenarmor stuff, the free version pretty much grabbed 5-6gb of ram and my system runs at around 7 to 7.5gb in use.

As far as the business license price, this is in reference to many years ago when I priced it, so might be outdated... PF for the license type I needed was significantly more money per year than I recently paid for 3 years of OPN. I'm not at some fortune 500 company that throws $100 a plate luncheons for my coworkers, we have limited funds each year. The $4xx USD that I paid was certainly right in the realm of possible and should be in the realm after three years to renew. I should probably check current pricing on PF for what I would need (can't use the personal/homelab license level), but too many other things going on to spend the time.

Also, I mentioned what I'm doing and what my plans were to one of the technology companies that supplies us, suggestion was that maybe they should start selling hardware and software for OPN and learn it and support it. Not sure if they will look into it (they like Forti products), but hoping because it would be easier to buy the hardware when I can get it through the budget process. I specifically linked to the two 27xx devices because those are where I think I need to be for my system (hopefully 2770).

[franco]

> I'll disagree about the hardware pricing...

I don't mind at all, because you are right as well. That's another point of view here. I should have said "more expensive" and make a better reference to comparable low end hardware.


Cheers,
Franco

[Greg_E]

Not to draw this out... But officially the T740 that I have running is over $800usd new, add in a new NIC card and new ram and drive and you are up at that $1000+usd price point where the 2752 exists, and I don't think the T740 has the same CPU power when needed.

That said, I bought my T740 new in box from a liquidation company with 2 years of warranty from HP left, for $200usd. The tags said they were for a bank and the seller had hundreds of them. Guessing he bought them for $100 each and bought about 500 units or more. They really zip on the linux thinclient OS, even when doing RDP they were really responsive and I may put one up for this purpose.

Now maybe when you think about the desktop devices, the DEC compared to a cheap n100 system is expensive, and I get it. But for my uses, a good Supermicro with Intel Scalable Silver processor for around $1200usd, and add in a decent NIC for probably another $100 to $200 and I'm right where the 2770 lives. I think the cheapest rack mount formerly Atom processor Supermicro is going to cost around $800-$900 which may not really be worth it for most people unless power draw (and heat) is a big concern.