Mods, after reading my reply as follows, It's reading like a sales pitch. That's not my intnet - i'm trying to highlight why many people may be more interested in purchasing from Protectli than generic hardware from China. If I need to tone down the links and the sales pitch I'm happy to do so - please let me know.
First, we will try not to take too much offense at the implied lack of creativity in just reselling "generic Chinese hardware". (J/k, it's a reasonable comment and we're happy to address it). Second, there is certainly nothing wrong with much of the generic Chines hardware out there. Plenty of people have had plenty of success doing so.
That said, the Chinese market is full of knockoffs and copycats. TBH, our original FW1 was just an off the shelf box that we sourced from China. However, recent hardware (such as our FW4B, VP2410) is our own bespoke design. There's a lot of suspiciously similar looking hardware out there, but what I would offer as our commitment to our hardware is that we not only create the hardware design, but we also port and support coreboot (https://coreboot.org) firmware for our hardware. If unfamiliar, coreboot is an open source firmware that is MUCH more lightweight than a traditional BIOS, is custom built for the specific hardware, and is actually open source which is becoming more and more important at the firmware layer as we continue to learn about microcode and hardware vulnerabilities in closed ecosystems.
Finally, we do pride ourselves on customer satisfaction, as reviews on Amazon and elsewhere will attest to. We go way outside of the box to help customers not only get their hardware in order, but also resolve issues with OS's that they're trying to install. We provide a KB with loads of testing that we do with different OS's (and even specific VPN configurations like OpenVPN, and wireguard) to ensure that they work on our hardware and we'll even go as far as to help customers troubleshoot software issues if they appear to be reasonably adjacent to a potential hardware problem or conflict.
Hopefully that helps? Feel free to reach out incase of other questions.