Every year, small businesses across the country quietly hand over hundreds — sometimes over a thousand dollars — to firewall vendors for the privilege of keeping their security features turned on. Not for new hardware. Not for better protection. Just to maintain the features they already paid for when they bought the device.
At PC Methods, we standardized on Netgate firewalls running pfSense+ years ago. The reason comes down to one thing: total cost of ownership. And when you run the numbers side by side, the difference is hard to ignore.
Brands like SonicWall, Fortinet, Cisco Meraki, and Cisco Firepower have adopted a subscription model for their security features. Threat prevention, content filtering, VPN licensing, firmware updates, and even basic technical support are often gated behind annual renewal fees. Miss a renewal and your firewall doesn't just stop getting updates — in some cases, key protections are disabled entirely.
For a small or mid-sized business, these fees typically run $600 to over $1,100 per year — on top of whatever you paid for the hardware. SonicWall, for example, bundles their threat protection subscription in 3-year packages that work out to roughly $740 per year.
Here's how annual subscription costs compare for SMB-class firewalls in roughly the same performance tier as the Netgate 4200:
Netgate's pfSense+ software is open source and included with the hardware. There is no mandatory annual subscription to keep your firewall's security features active. If you want optional TAC (technical support) coverage from Netgate directly, that runs about $129 per year — still a fraction of what competing platforms charge just to stay functional.
If a comparable competitor firewall costs $700 per year in subscriptions, that's $3,500 over five years — before you've paid for a single hour of IT support or a hardware refresh. For a business with two or three locations, multiply that across each site.
The hardware cost of a Netgate appliance is comparable to what you'd pay for a SonicWall or Fortinet unit in the same class. The difference shows up year two, year three, and every year after.
That's the TCO argument in plain English: you're not getting a cheaper firewall. You're getting a firewall with a better long-term cost structure.
Open source doesn't mean unprotected. pfSense+ is the commercial version of pfSense, maintained by Netgate and used in enterprise, government, and ISP environments around the world. It includes:
The feature set rivals what you'd get from a $1,000/year subscription on competing platforms — without the subscription.
Managing a firewall isn't a one-time task. Rules need to be updated as your business changes, firmware patches need to be applied before vulnerabilities are exploited, and when something stops working — a VPN drops, a remote employee can't connect, a new application gets blocked — someone needs to diagnose it fast. And when a firewall goes completely down, it usually takes the entire business with it: no internet, no cloud apps, no remote access, no phones if you're running VoIP. For most small businesses, that's not a job that can sit in a queue until Tuesday. An MSP handles all of that continuously: monitoring the device, pushing updates, adjusting rules, and responding to issues as part of your regular agreement. You're not just paying for someone to manage a box — you're buying the certainty that someone who knows your network is watching it, and that a firewall problem won't become a business problem.
A typical Fox Valley MSP charges around $100 per month per device for firewall monitoring and management — which covers firmware updates, rule changes, monitoring, and incident response. That fee is the same whether the firewall says Netgate or SonicWall on the front. The difference is what your vendor is charging you on top of that.
If your current firewall came with your internet service, or if you're paying annual subscription fees to a firewall vendor just to maintain your security posture, it's worth having a conversation about whether that's the best use of your IT budget.
We're not anti-SonicWall or anti-Fortinet — those are solid products. But for most small and mid-sized businesses, the subscription savings from Netgate alone can offset the cost of managed IT support. That's a different way of thinking about your firewall: not as a one-time purchase, but as a line item you can optimize.
If you'd like to see what a Netgate-based security setup would look like for your business, book a free 15-minute call and we'll walk you through it.
Note: Subscription pricing estimates are based on published list rates as of 2025–2026 and are subject to change. Contact your reseller for current pricing.