Home Protect is now available with options for Threat Prevention and WireGuard

[Cferra]

If in fact that there were massive fraud occurring by home license holders, at the end of the day untangle would know. Besides the fact that honestly how enforceable is the non-commercial part of their license is it for someone who does day trading at home (I do not) or sells a used item on eBay - according to their at home licenses - both those things would invalidate any home license that they have offered. I think that’s a bit unreasonable to be honest. If people are using the product in good faith at their home - that should be enough and geographically- untangle reports it’s location so that is easily established.

I’d like to see honest statistics of home licenses holders who abused the license in real world cases like using the product in a business environment.

[drmilo]

Since this thread has the most replies, in this forum, I thought it might receive a message from Untangle clarifying some of the questions regarding honoring prior license and ability manage greater than 150 devices some users appear to have. Unfortunately it appears dmorris is no longer working there as he did a great post the last time they changed the package back in 2017. As a new user it is very encouraging that they have continued to honor their prior subscriptions even though they are not available to new customers. Since there are no post clarifying I think it is fair to assume their logic/approach continues to this day.

I'm going to repost here as it makes it very clear home enthusiast is a "favor" and not an intended market opportunity in their eyes
1. They make it available to home enthusiast, but not an intended market. Enthusiast and not consumer is the key word.
2. The do not want the home market to impact their normal business
3. Remove some apps to avoid abuse (very reasonable)
4. Some services are cloud based/subscription so they are passing through the cost (reasonable if still true)
5. "Never expected this many enthusiast"

I think these points are all fair (probably obvious to people using it for years,) and it is a private business so they can run it how they chose. At $50 a year it was an easy decision to buy a small business firewall that you could deploy at home. At $150 a year it does beg the question are their consumer directed products that offer similar features, plus more consumer centric features that I will highlight below.

Consumer features missing from a combination of post:
1 mDNS (#1 requested consumer feature since 2018)
2 Dynamice DNS
3 DNS Caching & DNS HTTPS
4 Ability to run docker containers
a. PiHole (or adguard)
b. Unifi Controller
c. other
5. Geoblocking preconfigs

Ease of use for people that have FTTH from Clink which requires PPPOE with VLAN tagging. Ability to add vlan tagging in the network configuration wizard

At the end of the day Untangle has created a symbiotic relationship with local businesses which is great. The local take part of Untangle's hardware margin by offering their own configuration and in return they post thousands of support messages for free. The local hardware margin affords a higher level of support. It is great to see and everyone benefits.

https://forums.untangle.com/announce...e-changes.html
Home Package changes

Its been 1.5 years since we release the original home offering, and we're making some much needed changes.

1)
We now sell a new offering called "HomePro" - and it is a "separate" product, not a band for the Complete Package.
The price is still $50/yr. Current home package subscribers keep & renew their existing offering.

You can now see it as its own Product in "Products" in the buy page:
https://www.untangle.com/buy/

This will hopefully eliminate any confusion about it being licensed by active devices or band. It is not. HomePro is available for residential non-commercial use only.

2)
It is also clearer on the Buy page that live support is not included. We would love to include support obviously but it is not cost effective for us to do so. The home offering is an offering for enthusiasts to run Untangle at home, but our core market is the business market.

We strive to have top-level support. We don't want to have our customers call and get a subpar experience or talk to a person that barely speaks english and is following a script. We also don't want to divert calls to the web or help to try to reduce volume. Our support techs are real techs that are highly trained. This support model does not work for consumer-market support and we are committed to sticking with this model to provide top-level support.

Home users can always buy a separate support subscription, or they can get help on the forums or from the many options available among the Untangle community.

3)
We have removed the "Branding Manager" application. This will hopefully reduce overlap and home abuse.
While we never want to remove functionality it is necessary for us to address abuse and this is one of the features we felt had little application in home use.

4)
The "Virus Blocker" now uses the cloud engine - not the local bitdefender engine. This is mainly a performance and cost issue.

5)
Also, Tunnel VPN is now included with 13.1
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-relea...300514525.html

Thank you for all the home support we received over the past 1.5 years! We never really thought we would get this much traction.
Hopefully these changes will allow us to continue to reach the home market without disruption to our normal business.

[Sam Graf]

As a new user it is very encouraging that they have continued to honor their prior subscriptions even though they are not available to new customers. Since there are no post clarifying I think it is fair to assume their logic/approach continues to this day.

Here we will have to disagree. There is one valuable and helpful post clarifying things. The home offerings have been reset. Part of that reset is to EOL home licenses, beginning with the original Home license. The Home license has a set (although undisclosed, to my knowledge) EOL. An EOL for the HomePro license has not yet been set.

If I've misunderstood or misrepresented the new policy, I apologize. I have no interest in stirring the pot with misrepresentations. At the same time, I think it risky to assume the old logic prevails. Publicly available statements, including the feature set of Home Protect Basic, all suggest a genuine reset to the home offerings.

[sky-knight]

Here we will have to disagree. There is one valuable and helpful post clarifying things. The home offerings have been reset. Part of that reset is to EOL home licenses, beginning with the original Home license. The Home license has a set (although undisclosed, to my knowledge) EOL. An EOL for the HomePro license has not yet been set.

If I've misunderstood or misrepresented the new policy, I apologize. I have no interest in stirring the pot with misrepresentations. At the same time, I think it risky to assume the old logic prevails. Publicly available statements, including the feature set of Home Protect Basic, all suggest a genuine reset to the home offerings.

That is all correct as far as I know as well, Untangle announcing when the Home, and HomePro subscriptions would be EOL'd would be helpful. The lack of this information makes Untangle look malicious in this action. That being said, that's just the sort of detail that Untangle has historically been slow to reveal.

So we have an unprecedented change to subscriptions up against historically normal behavior on the part of Untangle's leadership.

Which is why forum fire...

So if HomePro is something you want, then I suggest you renew it for the longest duration you can have it, because that sub will live until termination. If Untangle accepts the sale, they have to honor the contract. However, once it expires, that's it... you're moving to the new pricing. Which will be whatever is on sale at that time in the future, and none of us can be quite sure what that will be.

This is the tyranny of the subscription, a fact of life in this industry.

[drmilo]

Helpful post Sky. I have been looking for info on Threat Prevention. I watched that YouTube IPS, but can’t find comparable overview of the Threat prevention. For me that is the only product worth the cost and lack good information. I don’t need wireguard and on the fence installing ssl certificates on all home devices. Kids have school issued chrome books and we signed an agreement we wouldn’t install anything on them. Concerned ssl inspector may cause more problems than value.

I turned on IPs rules on for critical, high and medium. So far no problems, but logging in the 100k as expected.

Thanks

[sky-knight]

Helpful post Sky. I have been looking for info on Threat Prevention. I watched that YouTube IPS, but can’t find comparable overview of the Threat prevention. For me that is the only product worth the cost and lack good information. I don’t need wireguard and on the fence installing ssl certificates on all home devices. Kids have school issued chrome books and we signed an agreement we wouldn’t install anything on them. Concerned ssl inspector may cause more problems than value.

I turned on IPs rules on for critical, high and medium. So far no problems, but logging in the 100k as expected.

Thanks

Threat Prevention is a reputation system that impacts all sessions, not just HTTP/HTTPs. So you can think of it as Web Filter, but it works on all protocols. So far the most use I've had with the module has been to contain Firefox's stupid DoH requests, with Threat Prevention running all my DNS queries are going to the configured DNS services. Because Firefox, despite it's assertions otherwise... will NEVER STOP using Cloudflare.

I don't mind it using Cloudflare, I mind that it does so when I tell it not to.

[rnatalli]

Sorry if this was already discussed, but is free still an option? Not worried about myself, but do have a relative out there with a basic Untangle setup at home.

[jcoffin]

Sorry if this was already discussed, but is free still an option? Not worried about myself, but do have a relative out there with a basic Untangle setup at home.

Threat Prevention app has never been part of the free edition. Or are you asking if there is still a free edition of Untangle NGFW? Yes, the free version of Untangle is still available.

[rnatalli]

Threat Prevention app has never been part of the free edition. Or are you asking if there is still a free edition of Untangle NGFW? Yes, the free version of Untangle is still available.

Yes, I was asking if the free edition still exists. Thank you.

[sky-knight]

Yes, I was asking if the free edition still exists. Thank you.

Yes! The Untangle platform is still there as always. All of Untangle's subscriptions are optional, additions on top of the free platform.