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Comment by rekabis | Hacker News Reader

IMHO, those who want a router with open-source firmware are going to have the technical knowledge to do the finding and flashing themselves, by virtue of being embedded in tech deeply enough to recognize the value of an open-source firmware in the first place.

Those who look at you blankly when you mention open-source router firmware aren’t likely going to become customers.

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You would be surprised at how many people that know enough to be curious but are not ready to jump straight into flashing custom firmware yet. I've seen people sell pre-flashed wired and wireless routers like this for years on platforms like EBay. I think there's already a niche there, even if it's small.

I'm not sure how approachable tools like Claude Code have made this for people though. If I was just getting started, I would probably just have the tool do it for me.

I know how to flash firmware, but I'd still rather buy routers that have open-source firmware pre-flashed and tested by the vendor. This is simply because I've often run into issues with OpenWrt. I once bought a bunch of Archer C7s because it was described as a good router for OpenWrt, only to discover dmesg full of crashes from the proprietary wireless firmware running on the 5Ghz chip. In another case, I learned long after installing OpenWrt that the performance was much worse than stock firmware because OpenWrt didn't support hardware routing offload.

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