Cancelling my subscription: feedback on the home-user value proposition

[annoniempjuh]

multi-core support isn't in the Home subscription... and its probably not going to be in the SOHO tier also...
upgrade to business up to 100 devices (where home has 200...) is also going to be $1,361.00 /year
that is to much for me as a small home user, and for only Multi-core support.
I also find the gap between the home and other tiers to big...

[Greg_E]

We mostly do not need any of the SASE features

I'll disagree, lab is where you want to fool with these features the most, then decide what and how much to put into production.

I'll have to look into the SASE starter for my lab, just getting a new to me hardware set up and would really like to look into options for production going forward.

[notspam]

To tell the truth:
An inspection service these days without spreading to multi threads and multi core is useless.

We have at home fibre connections to the internet with speeds up to 1 Gbps symmetric (300 Mbps, 600 Mbps, 1 Gbps).
At home, as private customer, no special business product and not expensive.

If it is planned
- to profit from a free community for the development
- to benefit from the reputation the product is known in a wider community
- to bind private users free at no cost to a product for a gain in business awareness
it is mandatory that a product not only thinks on the own side of their business plan.

Look at Sophos they disabled f.e. the memory limit of 6 GB memory to unlimited memory usage for their home user community. Why ? Because it is needed.

My opinion on this zenarmor business case:
Open multi core for free to the community.
Otherwise it took not much time and the community users go away like in the pfsense community.

If you want the benefit of a wide testing community you can not make a business with them and demand money. It is the real deal to give the needs back to the community. They are part of your success with the product. So you should be able to reinvest in the community needs.

These words should help to find a solution that is a real win win situation and a healthy basic for the upcoming future of zenarmor.

Look at Sophos they integrate the community on the feature usage completely and do not castrate the community edition to a small piece of their product.

[Glitch01]

I disabled ZA free edition and didn't subscribe to the home tier because of lack of multi-threaded support. I found it was indeed bottle-necking my 10G network. While I did enjoy the extra layer of controls, it wasn't worth limiting my network traffic. 

[Cljackhammer]

I disabled ZA free edition and didn't subscribe to the home tier because of lack of multi-threaded support. I found it was indeed bottle-necking my 10G network. While I did enjoy the extra layer of controls, it wasn't worth limiting my network traffic. 

same here. Zenarmor introduces latency due to its architecture. In this day and age of 2.5 gbps + internet, Zenarmor has lost it's utility. There are other ways to secure a network without having to "pay" for multi-core support.

[abenaou]

I agree with most of what was said in this thread, the other thing I feel very limiting is the number of policies, having just 5 policies can become a serious limitation for the home licence subscribers.

I wish other database back ends were considered, obviously the developers have their own reasons, but I feel between elastic and sqlite the choices are restrictive as both could wear out the disk while having an external mariadb handling the database aspect would make things more flexible.

Anyway, this is unrelated to the first post but thought giving some feedback can help improve the product.

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Out of curiosity: can't you use an off device Elastic installation? E.g I run Elastic as an "app" on TrueNAS for my FreeBSD jail based Nextcloud to use.

[tangofan]

My OPNsense box is a little over two years old and I had Zenarmor running for two years with a home subscription, using a local elasticsearch DB. The lifetime writes of my SSD are about 5.7 TiB, which is very mild compared to the rated typical lifespan of an SSD. So I suspect those who have a wear problem with their SSD have some additional features or logs turned on or turned to a higher logging level.

What made me discontinue my Zenarmor home subscription and ultimately uninstall Zenarmor were performance problems like the one I described here. I don't know, if those particular problems could have been solved by multicore support (single I don't know how granular the workload for a particular connection can be shared between different threads), but not having it or getting it means that I definitely would have to get a system with a CPU that has higher single-core performance than an Intel J6412. And that just didn't seem to be worth it.

So I would agree with the assessment that Zenarmor has a growing problem with positioning themselves. I understand that they don't want their free edition or their home edition subscription to cannibalize their commercial subscriptions (particularly in the SMB sector, where you might not need enterprise-level sizing). My assumption is that the main purpose of the free and home tiers is to have a showcase to home-labbers, in the hope that some of them would carry a positive experience into their workplace and thus increase Zenarmor's commercial subscription base. However as the home-labber experience turns less positive, that "carryover" effect is much less likely to happen. Thus I am surprised that they don't offer multithreading (with a limited thread count) in the free and home editions.