Cloud Hosted Router is a great product to run and test RouterOS in a virtual environments including Public Clouds.
It can be used for free with a Free licenses (CHR License Levels) and that works well in a lot of testing cases, but sometimes it’s just too slow.
Run local/cloud lab
Run local/cloud Dude
Is there any reason to not increase Free license to the 10 Mbit/s? That speed is too slow for the the current World Internet access speed and especially for production use.
Do you see a lot of not fair use use cases for the 10 Mbit/s?
Or maybe to introduce cheaper licenses for 10 and 100 Mbit/s for people who do not need 1 Gbit/s?
On the other hand, the cheapest paid license costs as much as mAP or hAP.
Mikrotik also needs to have some income from their efforts. It’s not a non-profit organization.
It it really such a big deal for a one-time fee, lifetime available ?
With CHR you do not pay for a device and rather for a license, but it probably adds some overhead for Mikrotik, at least to handle these licences and ROS support.
If you have a lab with 5 CHR it is ~ 200$ for just some testing/learning, but yeah there can be different points of view on that.
OK … get 5 hAP Lite, ROS L4 and 5x 25$
Almost half the price then.
Added plus, you get physical devices with wireless radios.
You never know when an added 2.4GHz radio can come in handy (I always have AX Lite LTE in my backpack, before mAP, served me already multiple times).
For lab purposes, I prefer physical stuff and ethernet cables and such
Serious now:
Those CHRs also need to run on some virtualization environment, right ? I assume it doesn’t come free ?
I don’t think it’s about overhead. It’s about the fact that you are getting a lifetime license. You are basically funding all future updates that you will get for free.
Kind of agree. Paying for the smallest CHR license “CHR KEYS” (not the x86 that is HW-bound “ROUTEROS KEYS”). You (with the current schema) get a lifetime license at the level you are paying for. Without recurring fees. That can be moved from one device to another device. Subject to be re-validated every 60 days (at minimum).
I believe there is some “trick” (which @normis pointed out in some forum post). Basically the trial license just don’t allow upgrade but remains full speed - if I recall correctly…
But kinda with @holvoetn, if there is a hint of some production use, the $50-100 for license is pretty fair deal. We have sites with VMWare, and basically CHR saves so much money compared to VMWare’s DR “vXXX” features, most of which we don’t need… I almost feel bad CHR is only $100.
@Amm0: You do recall correctly. It is not even a trick, just normal function. Free licence allows all features but limits the speed. Great for basic monitoring even in a production environment.
Trial (which expires and prevents upgrades) is perfect for labs and testing with its full speed forever. Whenever user needs to upgrade, they can just export config, recreate VM and import config back, which makes it not great for production, but perfectly fine for test environment.
Yes, including Perpetual licenses. “system license print” will show you the time left until the device needs to contact MikroTik. After that time runs out, you will not be able to upgrade RouterOS, but nothing will stop working.
The router will never stop working, regardless of license type or connectivity issues, there will be just some limitation after 2 months after the last license renewal.
You want to talk about overhead, let’s talk about what it costs to keep “…more than 280 employees” coming back to the office day after day.
You want production-grade software for free because…? Give me a better reason than “because I want it.”
The purpose of the limited bandwidth is that it’s enough to show you that your firewall/routing/etc rules work. Once you’ve proven to yourself that CHR is useful, pay them for their hard work making it so.
In the first post mentioned at least 2 related topics.
Also was curious about production use cases with the 10 Mbit/s. Such a speed is more comfortable for testing, but still a good reason to purchase a license for production use.
Probably there can be different cases - World is big
Is that mentioned somewhere in the documentation - Free licenses? Heard about that first time in that topic. That is not so bad workaround, but question is still relevant.
As @tangent wrote: if you want to use something (e.g. a CHR) for production, then show some decency and purchase necessary tools (yes, software is a tool).
With 10Mbit/s speed limit there wouldn’t be many real usage cases but some people would probably still buy it.
Since devices with interfaces slower than 1GbE are still sold by MikroTik in 2024, I think it would be nice if there was another CHR tier between free and P1. I would gladly buy several licences of this kind. I’m not saying that I want it for free by any means, I’d just like to have the same choice that is available with actual hardware.
That is a good point. Some of the hardware has lower specs than 1G and less than $45… Yet you cannot get “software-only” below 1G.
I never thought about… but “P0.xx” paid license isn’t a bad idea.
i.e.
P0.1 with 100Mb/s for $20?
P0.01 with 10Mb/s for $10?
Do you seriously think that generating licences is done manually in a company this big? Obviously there’s a server somewhere with automated software doing this job.
This exactly
P0 plan offering 100Mbit limit sold for $20 (or generally half the price of P1) would be perfect, at this price there would be no reason for a smaller one.
