alt Hacker NewsSo 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.
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There are some routers with OEM fork of OpenWRT that allow you to flash stock openwrt without any obstacles and by easily dropping the image blob in the web UI - just easy as upgrading the firmware from stock openwrt.
Granted, not exactly what you wished for, but pretty close.
The time to do this is <5 minutes. One such router I personally know of is GL.iNet GL-MT6000: https://openwrt.org/toh/gl.inet/gl-mt6000
There is something that a lot of people looking at businesses like this fail to realize. Something like this probably doesn't scale. You can get reasonably Wealthy opening a small specialized shop just yourself selling to just a small niche of customers. However, this business doesn't scale: You will never be worth ten million dollars opening a business like this. If you are fine with being a one or maybe two people working in a shop and earning a good income but working 40 hours a week supporting your customers, yeah, it's worth a shot to open the business. You will never be as large as Google and so you'll never be worth billions of dollars but might be good business.
Unfortunately I had to use might there and not Will. I do not know for sure if this is a good business. I would like to say I would recognize such a business if it was near me, but I don't know. I can do this myself. I don't know if you can make enough value that it's worth me paying. If it takes you three hours to flash a router, I can do that myself. And even if it takes me six hours, Three hours of your time at a reasonable wage is more than I could afford.