A hobbyist / homelab subscription tier (similar to Proxmox VE “Community”)

General questions
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve been running VyOS Rolling in my homelab for a while now, and I really appreciate the work the team and contributors put into the project. It’s become a core part of my setup, and I’d like to give something back financially.

The problem

At the moment, there’s no realistic way for me as a hobbyist to do that. The current subscriptions are clearly designed for companies: the entry-level options cost well over €1,000 per year and bundle SLA-backed support that I don’t need and wouldn’t use. For a single router at home, that’s out of reach for me and, I suspect, for most of the homelab community.

That leaves hobbyists with the rolling release, VyOS Stream, or building LTS images ourselves. All of these work, but none of them lets us pay VyOS for what we’re actually using.

A suggestion: a “Community” tier

Proxmox has solved this well with their Proxmox VE Community subscription. For €120 per year per CPU socket, it gives access to the stable Enterprise Repository, with no enterprise support. Help is only available through the community forum. It’s explicitly aimed at home labs, training environments and non-critical workloads (pricing page).

A VyOS equivalent could look like this:

  • Access to LTS images and updates (or the LTS package repository)

  • No ticket support, only community forum help

  • Non-commercial / non-production use only

  • Priced for individuals, e.g. somewhere in the €100-200/year range per license

Why this could benefit VyOS

  • New revenue from people currently paying nothing. Many homelab users would gladly pay a modest amount for stable updates. Even a small fraction of the hobbyist user base adds up, and it costs very little to serve because no support is included.

  • No cannibalization of enterprise sales. Restricting the tier to non-commercial use and leaving out support keeps the line between hobbyist and business clear. Companies that need SLAs still have to buy the existing plans.

  • More testers on LTS. Hobbyists running LTS at home would report bugs on the same code base enterprise customers run, rather than only on rolling.

  • A pipeline to enterprise customers. Many of us are network engineers or sysadmins by profession. People who run VyOS at home are the ones who recommend it at work. Proxmox is a good example of how a strong homelab following translates into business adoption.

  • Goodwill and community. It shows hobbyists that their support is welcome, and turns “free users” into paying supporters with a stake in the project.

I fully understand that VyOS needs a sustainable business model, and I’m not asking for anything for free. I’m asking for a way to pay that fits a hobbyist budget.

Would the team be open to considering something like this? And for other homelab users here: would you buy such a subscription, and at what price?

Thanks for reading, and thanks for VyOS!

2

Personally, yes, I would be interested in this type of license.

I run vyOS for my parents and my own apartment.

In addition I run it on one bare metal server colocated in a DC in Amsterdam to function as my eBGP router, connected to multiple IX’s and transit for my own AS.

Price point wise: it would have to be sub 100€ and not dependent on core count or system count in my opinion.

Remember this is not a enterprise production system (for me), this is mostly a hobby. There’s nothing holding me back from ditching vyOS if I had to and just run bare-metal Linux or some other OS.

Sure, I would have to rewrite my config but with a little help of AI that wouldn’t take long.

3

Thanks for the reply, that’s a fair point!

You’re right that Rolling and Stream work fine for a homelab, and I’m happy running them. For me, though, this isn’t really about getting access to something I can’t get otherwise. It’s more of a principle.

VyOS is software I rely on every day, and I believe the people who build software should be able to make a living from it. When a project matters to me, I want to contribute back in whatever way I can. I’m not a developer, so code contributions aren’t really an option. Money is the most direct way I can help, and right now there’s no way to do that on a hobbyist budget.

The point is to have some path between “pay nothing” and “pay enterprise prices,” so that hobbyists who want to support the project can do so within their means.

And I suspect I’m not the only one here who feels that way.

4

I would be willing to pay. I’ve played with VyOS in the past, and if there was a proper channel to pay something reasonable for my usage, I would. I like the project a lot, and am considering moving to it for the family houses that I maintain.

5

I give this a hearty second.

6

Add me to that list, running VyOS as home office firewall.