For COTS stuff you can go cheap or powerful, but I've not seen anything that comes close at the $50 price point that the ER-X (or Mikrotik equivalent) goes for.

For COTS stuff you can go cheap or powerful, but I've not seen anything that comes close at the $50 price point that the ER-X (or Mikrotik equivalent) goes for. The Protectli stuff is larger because it's mostly a giant heat sink. Intel's just not at the right point on the price/performance curve for fanless, and it's all way more expensive. The four port ER-X uses, what, a 12W power supply? Give me something more pared down. I don't want SATA ports, an integrated GPU, WiFi, LTE, whatever. The new Cavium (now Marvell) ARM stuff is interesting, but unobtanium stateside. For reference I bought into the ER-X when I was dealing with a couple different locations and I even bought one to toy around with. As for Ubiquiti, I remember them thumbing their noses at the GPL and introducing security bugs in u-boot or having no idea how to fix the issues with RADIUS. They had no clue how to work around Cavium bugs (or get support from Cavium). I remember a company that shipped products based on a lightly skinned Vyatta using an end-of-life'd version of Debian (note that Debian ended support specifically for MIPS). I remember a company that shipped products (ER-X, ER-L) that ran hot enough to reliably cook themselves. And, yeah, Mongo. It was just a mess top-to-bottom.