I would like to buy a hardware UTM for home use (up to 5 devices). I appreciate this product maybe overkill for my scenario as this type of product appears to be aimed for business/higher device networks however I want to experiment and learn more about this device/system. For this reason, it is not justified to spend a large amount of money on a device I don’t actually need, I just want to learn about it (I simply learn better getting my “hands dirty” if you will).

My research has not found definitive information that the solution I want is actually available. Here is what I believe to be true so far;

UTM’s being aimed at business users are monitized with a initial cost to buy the hardware and then charging a licence fee for additional/useful features in a business envionment for an ongoing fee - licence fee.UTM’s can be either hardware or software based depending on the provider -UTM’s can be purchased via resellers on e-commerce sites such as E-bay however it is not always clear if the sale cost of these models is a one-off/flat cost or if you would still need to purchase/renew a licence with the provider for it to work?

My best soloution so far; Sophos offer a free UTM which appears to be well suited for my basic needs of experimentation. Now this is a software based UTM and needs to be installed on a dedicated computer or a VM. The VM option is good to start with so I can learn about the configuration options etc however I want as much data caputred from my home network as possible therefore want the UTM monitoring the network all day every day. I prefer not to leave a PC/VM running on power all day due to cost and physical space limitations. I would like to run the UTM from a dedicated hardware applicance made specifically for this purpose - these are small, convenient, lower power consumption than using my spare PC.

Coming back to my question;

Assuming most/all dedicated hardware UTM applicances require an ongoing fee, then I guess my soloution would be to have the ability to install a free software based UTM (e.g Sophos free home UTM) on a hardware UTM applicance (either recipricol to the software provider so Sophos in this case or from any manufacturer subject to meeting the minimum system requirements of the software) purchased from a reseller (e.g. Ebay).

If this option is feasable then I would achieve my goal of;

having a dedicated UTM hardware applicancepaid money as a “one-off” cost in this case for the hardware only with no further/ongoing/licence fees

For further clairty, I would like to provide an analogy of what I’d like to do; I can buy a PC from a reseller site like Ebay for a one-off cost. I can then keep the existing Operating system of Windows if it remains free alternatively I can install a different OS (that meets the system spec) which maybe a free version of Linux. The PC is too large, inconvenient, power hungry for what it is to be used for, so instead I buy a small device such as a laptop.

@Sophos