Making money with pi-hole

just had an early morning coffee chat(free donuts) with other tenants of my apartment building

they were talking about internet scams and other nasties that pi-hole tends to block, but none of them are what i would call competent in IT

has anyone gotten around to putting together all the hardware and software into an easy to implement package for the average user? might make a sellable item. make it about as plug and play as possible.

not sure how it meshes with the licensing.

it would have been nice to tell them "yeah, you can just get a pi-hole ad blocker for $XX.00 online at YYY.com"

no, these are people who would have no interest in learning how to set up a Pi, so please don't suggest that (the 60-80 age demographic)

Pi-Hole is not yours to sell.

My mother is 93 and has been using a computer since the first Mac came out. Plenty of people in that age group know quite a lot about computers. They were the generation that invented them.

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Its free not for sell :confused:

i guess he is not selling the software, but the time to install and set it all up. like said many times earlier an open source software is not free, because you have to put the time in it to learn.

If I understand @tater1337 right, he's more about 'Pi-hole as a service' - so he's more hosting those and not selling them per se. That's something that would be legit.

You can find people selling it on eBay. I can't imagine they have much success though as unless you plan to offer unlimited support you aren't going to find too many people willing to mess with their network who wouldn't already know either how to set up a Pi and Pihole or know how to figure it out. I just searched now and see a few listings.. a SD card with Pihole for £12, a Pi with Pihole for £90 from the same person, a Pi Zero with Pihole for £70. Don't see many sales.

Pihole as a service would be quite painful to maintain if you were selling that service to residential users with dynamic IP's - how would you lock it down reliably from the whole world while still making it accessable to the layman?

I was more about hosting pi-hole as installation and giving that DNS IP to the customer instead of devices.

You know - serverless computing and stuff (just like calling a hamburger a vegetarian dish as you didn't see the cattle)

There are existing dns providers that offer various levels of filtering. Check out opendns, cleanbrowsing, adguard dns, and nextdns to see any of them offer filtering that is similar to what you had in mind.

I meant the people in the coffee group, I guess i should not have lumped them in the age demographic

or we can assume your definition of 'lot' is single digit percentages

0% of the people in the group outside of me would know how to set up a pi, or have any desire to

From this you might conclude that they aren't interested in having such a device to block ads.

And the support load of "You broke my internet, this sucks, Pi-hole is awful." will be quite high.

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