Ask HN: Do you want a router that has DD-WRT pre-installed?

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.

I think OpenWrt is the more significant project nowadays, and routers with OpenWrt pre-installed are already available

> 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.

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).

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

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.

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/

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?

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.)

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.

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).

No, I want a router with OpenWrt pre-installed.

So I buy GL.iNet routers, which come with OpenWrt pre-installed.

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.

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'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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

I'm happy enough with my GL.iNet router.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Already have one, bought from a local Swedish store that flashes things like OpnSense and Dd-wrt on devices they sell.

No, I'd just do it myself with a trusted image, and save myself some money.

> 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.

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.

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.

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. [email protected]

There are a few that support DD-WRT out of the box, but the greater opportunity is in bringing open source firmware to everyone!

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.

"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)

DD-WRT isn't open-source though. OpenWRT is.

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.

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.

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 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'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.

DD-wrt is not a free software, and they sell licenses on their website. Does its license allows redistribution and/or selling the routers?

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.

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...

Not particularly to be honest, I'm fine with the one my ISP gave me

Yes I do. And also RouterOS seems good alternate for me