> StartWRT: Start9's fork of OpenWrt, including a modern GUI, that reimagines the router experience from first principles.
I wish them the best of luck with their hardware venture, but a custom fork of OpenWRT is not what I'd want for a router from a small startup.
I can't even begin to count how many startups have done crowdfunding projects for new hardware and tried to get too custom with the software stack before the company went under.
Others already covered the high price for the specs, but we really need to see some benchmarks for things that matter: Routing throughput, VPN throughput, and other real numbers. Faster ports aren't helpful if the CPU can't process packets fast enough.
I also wonder why they wouldn't work with upstream in improving the existing GUI (or upstreaming their improvements), instead of putting the burden of a fork upon themselves.
Working with upstream is most convenient for their users, for them, and for the ecosystem as a whole.
Is Start9 a well known company? The page by itself seems indistinguishable from a scam, but maybe they have a reputation that justifies their asking for $250,000?
Turris Omnia NG is also "open source" and has 2x 10 Gbps SFP+ and 4x 2.5 Gbps ethernet ports. StartWRT and Turris OS are both forks of OpenWRT, which is kind of annoying. The Turris project has been around a long time and has an active community.
Quick glance of their page only mentions Turris OS being built on open source. If I can't blow away Turris OS and install whatever, then it's not open and uninteresting.
Are the banana pi boards able to run a mainline kernel or close to it? I have a memory of getting real close to buying one of those, and then reading a comment on HN about having to run their Frankenstein setup
Given the similarities in port layout (just missing a HDMI and USB3 header), and that the case is nearly identical, I would guess that this router probably is a custom run of the exact same BananaPi board without those headers. Both also use MiniPCIe in 2026, which is a bit of an odd decision.
RISC-V is quite wimpy this far, so it’s not even clear if it can saturate a gigabit with features turned on. The one benefit is that it doesn’t have Intel IME/AMT, AMD PSP or ARM TrustZone backdoors built-in, but I would be extremely surprised if the Chinese SpaceMiT CPU didn’t have Chinese backdoors of its own.
> it’s not even clear if it can saturate a gigabit
If that's the case then it's not the CPU's fault. I can't open the linked site but assuming it's really the same as a BPI-F3 i.e. a SpacemiT K1 chip, that can do 2.8 GB/sec on large RAM to RAM memcpy using a CPU core i.e. 44 Gbps total, 22 Gbps each read and write. Plus I assume it's got DMA so no need to involve the CPU anyway.
Here is a test I ran in April 2025 on a Sipeed LicheePi 3A same chip).
> The one benefit is that it doesn’t have Intel IME/AMT, AMD PSP or ARM TrustZone backdoors built-in, but I would be extremely surprised if the Chinese SpaceMiT CPU didn’t have Chinese backdoors of its own.
That seems worth paying for. How could china hurt me more than my own government?
> StartWRT: Start9's fork of OpenWrt, including a modern GUI, that reimagines the router experience from first principles.
I wish them the best of luck with their hardware venture, but a custom fork of OpenWRT is not what I'd want for a router from a small startup.
I can't even begin to count how many startups have done crowdfunding projects for new hardware and tried to get too custom with the software stack before the company went under.
Others already covered the high price for the specs, but we really need to see some benchmarks for things that matter: Routing throughput, VPN throughput, and other real numbers. Faster ports aren't helpful if the CPU can't process packets fast enough.
I also wonder why they wouldn't work with upstream in improving the existing GUI (or upstreaming their improvements), instead of putting the burden of a fork upon themselves.
Working with upstream is most convenient for their users, for them, and for the ecosystem as a whole.
Is Start9 a well known company? The page by itself seems indistinguishable from a scam, but maybe they have a reputation that justifies their asking for $250,000?
It is not well know but I heard good thing about what they do.
It is very similar to Umbrel [0].
- [0] https://umbrel.com/
Turris Omnia NG is also "open source" and has 2x 10 Gbps SFP+ and 4x 2.5 Gbps ethernet ports. StartWRT and Turris OS are both forks of OpenWRT, which is kind of annoying. The Turris project has been around a long time and has an active community.
Quick glance of their page only mentions Turris OS being built on open source. If I can't blow away Turris OS and install whatever, then it's not open and uninteresting.
Vanilla OpenWRT runs Omnia (Marvell Armada). OpenWRT support for IPQ9574 is WIP. Omnia NG is IPQ9574.
https://openwrt.org/toh/turris/turris_omnia
Turris has its own OpenWRT warapper, but you can just wipe it and install the stock OpenWRT.
BananaPi already sells boards with same CPU for around $100 with maybe $15-20 extra for case
https://docs.banana-pi.org/en/BPI-F3/BananaPi_BPI-F3
Is it doing anything different ? I assume at least made in US so it can be sold as router and not dev board ?
Are the banana pi boards able to run a mainline kernel or close to it? I have a memory of getting real close to buying one of those, and then reading a comment on HN about having to run their Frankenstein setup
Given the similarities in port layout (just missing a HDMI and USB3 header), and that the case is nearly identical, I would guess that this router probably is a custom run of the exact same BananaPi board without those headers. Both also use MiniPCIe in 2026, which is a bit of an odd decision.
The page linked above contains links to their bootloader and Linux kernel tree (6.1 apparently), so chances are rather low.
Single WAN, Single LAN, is not actually what I would (or do) use for "home-based self-hosting". That hosted stuff gets its own network.
that is what vlans are for. but having only gigabit ports is limiting here.
RISC-V is quite wimpy this far, so it’s not even clear if it can saturate a gigabit with features turned on. The one benefit is that it doesn’t have Intel IME/AMT, AMD PSP or ARM TrustZone backdoors built-in, but I would be extremely surprised if the Chinese SpaceMiT CPU didn’t have Chinese backdoors of its own.
> it’s not even clear if it can saturate a gigabit
If that's the case then it's not the CPU's fault. I can't open the linked site but assuming it's really the same as a BPI-F3 i.e. a SpacemiT K1 chip, that can do 2.8 GB/sec on large RAM to RAM memcpy using a CPU core i.e. 44 Gbps total, 22 Gbps each read and write. Plus I assume it's got DMA so no need to involve the CPU anyway.
Here is a test I ran in April 2025 on a Sipeed LicheePi 3A same chip).
https://hoult.org/K1_memcpy.txt
> RISC-V is quite wimpy this far
The new K3 chip from the same manufacturer does 8.7 GB/s RAM to RAM memcpy using a dual issue in-order A100 ("AI") core, just over 3x faster.
Sure this pales in comparison to recent Apple / Intel / AMD but it's a lot faster than home networking.
> The one benefit is that it doesn’t have Intel IME/AMT, AMD PSP or ARM TrustZone backdoors built-in, but I would be extremely surprised if the Chinese SpaceMiT CPU didn’t have Chinese backdoors of its own.
That seems worth paying for. How could china hurt me more than my own government?
Exactly - seems like the only big thing going for it
VLANs would appear to defeat the ease of use aspect here. Plus that means you need managed switches, and know how to use them.
> Router
> Ethernet: 1 WAN Gb, 1 LAN Gb
> $250000
Awesome.
Cost is 300$ not 25k (for the end user) it looks like
But the fundraising goal is.
> Ethernet: 1 WAN Gb, 1 LAN Gb
Really? In 2026? Pass.
It needs to be _at_ _least_ two SFP+.