I was surprised to not see any post about this here yet, so here it is i guess.
Netgate (the company who runs pfSense) has just announced serious changes to their “free” so called “Home+Lab” license of pfSense.
Here is the link to their offical blog post.
Background:
Netgate have offered a free and opensource version of pfSense, called the CE (Community Edition). They also offered a version called “pfSense Plus” which was paid and offered a few more features but also support from Netgate, which is of course perfectly fine and very common (look at Proxmox for example).
A while ago (1,5 years) they introduced “Home+Lab” as a product and license version in order for casual users and “homelabbers” to dip a toe into their commercial offerings which has more features than the CE. Basically like “here you can use your enterprise version for free, but its a bit limited of course”. The obvious goal there is to motivate users to switch from the free CE to a paid version, again nothing wrong with that. Portainer for example does this too.
Because of this, users switched from the “always” free CE version to the “Home+Lab” version, upgrading their installations and enjoying a few more features. According to Netgate, thousands of users have installed it. Great!
Now
But just now Netgate have announced major changes to this, out of the blue, without any prior notice. The free “Home+Lab” version is no longer available for download, its just gone.
As a reason they cite that thirdparty sellers (on Aliexpress etc. i imagine) were downloading the “better” version of pfSense, aka the “Home+Lab” version, and installing it on their hardware appliances and then selling them. Without Netgate seeing any revenue from this.
Please see their blogpost for all the details. But one crucial point is that anyone who is currently running their “Home+Lab” version, can keep running it (yay!) but they also say that future upgrades and bugfixes may require a subscription. So basically, users installed a free “better” version, which now doesnt exist anymore, and to continue using it with updates, they “might” need to pay a subscription fee. Something as crucial like a firewall appliance should be kept up to date for security, so just ignoring that is not really a option. And Netgate also state that if you have to reinstall your current “Home+Lab” version, they cannot provide that for free to you. And those subscriptions apparently come at a very high price. Are you willing to pay $400/year for your firewall software when youre only using it privately in your small homelab?
Paying for software, or any product, is not a bad thing. And companies need to make money, they need to pay employees. This should be obvious. There is no problem with that in itself. But the way this was done, telling their userbase for quite a while to try out this free version of the premium product, and then pulling the rug away underneath the feet, is just plain wrong and fucked up.
“Okay whatever, then just switch back to the actual free CE version!” Great idea, but apparently thats not so super easy.
Lawrence Systems have already made a excellent video summing up all these changes. I would recommend watching it to get the full picture, i can and want to only cover a bit here:
They also made a video about switching back from pfSense plus (Home+Lab) to pfSense CE:
Reading recent posts about this on /r/pfSense subreddit, the community seems to be quite angry about this. And it doesnt help that their subreddit is actually run by Netgate employees, so it isnt exactly a independent discussion forum there at all. For example a user tried to get feedback and support for a tool to convert pfSense configs to OPNsense configs, and the moderators removed the post without further comment.
My personal recommendation would be that this is a huge opportunity to finally switch away from pfSense, they have shown once again that they cannot be trusted. Take a look at the most obvious “competitor” /r/OPNsenseFirewall, they started as a fork of pfSense and have developed quite nicely.
And to make it even more clear what kind of people are running Netgate (pfSense), if you havent read it yet, this is the story of when users announced the fork OPNsense, how a employee of Netgate was running opnsense.com which was a mock website entirely made to shit on the OPNsense project and discredit them. I encourage you to look at it and make up your own mind about it. And yes, this employee still works for them today it seems. This alone should be reason enough to never use anything by Netgate, ever, wether its a free CE or paid.
Atleast right now they are still offering the free and opensource CE version. But who knows how long that will last. They might as well kill that option without prior notice in a few months or a year from now. Its better to think about switching before being forced to.
There have also been various other issues with Netgate´s behaviour towards their users over the years, but covering them all here would be too much and offtopic, i would like to focus this post mostly on the very recent issue.
If people get angry about Oracle and seemingly shutting down “free” VPS instances at random, then they should be angry about Netgate pulling shit like this too.
#TL;DR
Stop using pfSense (just any Netgate products), switch to something else.
Its not the only alternative, but /r/OPNsenseFirewall is one major example.
Disclaimer: I am no pfSense expert, very far from it. If i got any of the history or current events wrong in this post, please let me know and i will immediately correct them. For me when the time came to pick a (virtualized) firewall/router appliance, i installed both pfSense and OPNsense in VMs and took a quick look. Even tho pfSense did leave a very “enterprise-ish” impression, it didnt feel right somehow, just odd in some way. Then looking at OPNsense, i felt immediately at home, i cant really narrow down why exactly. It simply felt much more open and friendly from the beginning. And i mean the software, at that point i had no idea what was going on between pfSense and OPNsense. All i knew was that OPNsense originated from pfSense, thats all. I tried both a tiny bit and quickly decided that i like OPNsense more, and thats what i have been using for a long time now and im very happy with it.
None of the existing flair options seem to really fit to this, so forgive me for not having any flair. Mods feel free to overwrite any flair to this.
OpenWrt on x86/64. Also being Linux based you gain features such as SQM which is a game changer for bufferbloat and responsiveness with devices.