50/50

This is not a new idea.

Several companies/single owner LLC's do this for a massively inflated price.

I understand why the inflated price, support and warranties, etc.

IT is not that hard for people who are technically inclined.

People who are not into it don't understand why.

If placement/marketing was for SMB that wanted to maximize dd-wrt usage and get a support contract in place I can see that

but outside of that, and a marketing youtube channel and being proactive on reddit, Idk how much can it scale and what point will you not get a cease and desist from vendors because I'm sure they have something nasty in their terms of service, which I think you may need to click through to enable the flash.

You've identified your market competiton price points, and all have deeper pockets than you, but do not offer free, open source software.

WRT3200ACM and the other previous model is a fab of mine to grab, it's been a year but I've collected 10+ and deploeyd them in strategic places for personal use,

You wouldn't need regulatory approval IMO. prototyping, what type? You'd follow the release schedule, get the best flavors/models and support those.

Overtime maybe you'd contribute back to the project, especially during hardware revisions. But it is very different from buying used hardware from ebay and flashing it to resell vs buying new and selling it as a value add on.

1. Yes, proper hacker route.

2. Proper route to an extent, it legitmiazes support, warranty and security.

3. Expensive, time consuming but, doable but not likely.

Yeah, the dropbox comment is infamous, but that was about launching a new SAAS that has infinite potential scale and solved a problem no one really wanted to fix at the time outside of one drive (which sucked at the time, was called skydrive afaik) and usb sticks which are...great but USB3 was new, usb2 was there and people were arguing back and forth why usb3 wasn't working or such

so:

to answer your question you need to really figure out a basic marketing question of 3 P's.

Product Price Placement.

Product is DD-WRT. Price: It's free. Placement: People that know what it is but don't have free time to install it?

No, not quite right, right? Let's try again:

Product: DD-WRT routers preconfigured for enterprise support and SMB. Price: Retail price of router + $100 per sold, with 1 yr warranty, additional warranty and stuff available at x and y? Placement: People that know what it is about but don't have free time ot install it or want to offshore this for a price.

Slightly better, but still:

So do I want it? I welcome anything FOSS in general w/ GNU/Linux and its a much needed stepping stone to continue having a decentralized internet:

but if it was so easy, people would've done it already, and they do.

It also reminds me of fontana which is how I netted a free WRT54G for offering what exactly, I don't know, but boy did I flash DD-wrt on that badboy and link it to my neighbors WiFi for free roadrunner internet to get my anime fansubs. So while as much as I'd like for the idea to flourish/am surprised wardriving and torrenting anime was a vector for getting me into tech I don't see it much out of a hobby business

and that is 100% OK

If you throw $5-10k a year at it, I think you can corner the niche, use AI automaiton for marketing campaigns, target tech conventions/festivals (like VCF) and youtube to build a audience it can scale.

but 125k? wow, no way - you ccan really do this for much less.

back to the scope of a opensource router: same as above, but if you really want, you need to find a manufacturer that already has a pre built configuration that at minimum supports the newest radio and minimum gigabit ethernet. GLI has theirs at $169, and hardware is a miminmal markup business, you can really find something similar to that and do a proper hardware cycle with a manufacturer and somewhat a contract but thats 50K including FCC licensing (if you know what to do, and you do the licensing yoruself, as well as Electrek/uL to cover CSPC. But hey, in todays world, everyone (well for past 30 years too) just makes it up and folds thier llc when caught.

For more business minded ideas, heres one about MSO/s and GLP1 from a Ycombinator 3x foudner and I comment with the same dissent:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49543849

So tl;dr why not pitch it for ycombinator winter, I think it's still open for submissions.

Add AI (why not, right?) and you can have a walking talking configuratuion wizard guide you to addung ublock,adblock, pihole, etc instead of the broken ecosystem we have today within dd-wrt because while I clearly can spot the pain points and issues, I lack the ability to turn them into viable selling points for investors to give me money and I should fix that someday :(