Security portfolio

Most households choose security software on price alone, because the alternative is reading marketing copy across a dozen vendor sites and still not knowing what renews at triple the intro rate. Meanwhile the protection people already pay for — bundled into a carrier plan, an ISP router, or a credit card — goes unused, and the same coverage gets bought a second time. Very few people give any of this attention until a fraud alert forces the issue, and by then a household is already absorbing the cost of an identity theft it could have made significantly less likely.

This tool does that reading on the household’s behalf. It takes device counts, adult and child seats, carrier, router capability, and a monthly budget, then returns a right-sized plan built on coverage the household already has, priced at both the intro and the renewal rate. The current release extends past price into governance: where each parent company is incorporated, what that jurisdiction can legally compel it to disclose, and whether the country participates in an intelligence-sharing alliance. Build and stack details are on the web design page.

A cost-first alternative to buying a Netgate appliance: pfSense on a two-port mini PC, for roughly what a Netgate 1100 costs but with an x86 CPU and 8 GB of RAM behind it. Full parts list with prices, the install and interface assignment, the first-login changes that matter, and the two kernel panics I hit — an Intel 7265 firmware fault and the 2.9.0 acpi_spmc erratum — with the fixes that held.