Hi
I have unfortunately lost my job and am looking at ideas to generate income.
I have been using PF as a home user for many years and love it.
My thought is to offer a cloud based PF firewall to home users and small business’
This will allow me to remotely support as well as expand from on-prem to cloud based.
I would appreciate some valuable and honest advice.
Kind regards
I’m sorry about your job loss. Could you go into detail about your model is and what exactly you can provide for users from the cloud?
Following! I never really had a chance to look into Cloud-based FW, that’s gonna be interesting 
Basically hosting PF on Azure for example and directing customer traffic to PF for content blocking and basic firewall uses.
I can install on prem firewalls locally, but if it could be done via the cloud then the possibilities are endless - to a degree.
Things I don’t know include:
Cost of hosting
Effect on client browsing, downloading, streaming etc
Potential security issues.
How would I access remote client kit for intitial setup.
If there is an internet outage - redundancy etc
Just an idea I have.
Sorry you lost your job, but that does not sound like a business model that there is any real demand for.
Have to agree with Tom’s comments
Trying to get Home Users and SMB to spend extra money , they will say we have a router why do I need this - probably a up hill battle
Thanks for the reply and advice. Mostly appreciated
This hard conversation with SMBs about replacing their router with a firewall…I’ve had it for years, they never wanted to switch…and one of them has been hacked last week…
Sorry to hear you’ve lost you job. Hope you can get back into work soon.
Regarding your idea, I would first ask a couple of questions:
What value are you providing your customers? You need to be able to provide something that they can’t get by directly buying pfSense cloud service from the likes of Azure. Can you compete on price? Can you add a valuable support service which is better that the native support from Azure (or whoever you are using for cloud services).
What level of support can you realistically provide? Are you able to operate 24x7? It might be hard to do if you are currently a one-man band.
Maybe you could offer a migration consultancy from existing on-prem to cloud. Does your pfSense skill-set scale from home use to business class easily.
Sorry to pose a lot of questions, but these are the sort of things you need to be able to answer honestly before taking the plunge.
Good luck with whatever direction you go in.
Mike.
Thanks for your honest reply.
I was/am in IT but more on the CCTV/IT infrastructure installation and management. Basically project management on the infrastructure side - not the DEV side.
All your points are valid and although I thought it a good idea, as mentioned above, it’s not a good business model.
I am cable with on-prem setups and would keep it basic - ie pfblockerNG, etc.
Firewall appliances are also quite pricey as well.
Kind regards