I don't really mind that they sell their appliances.
I don't "mind" either, it doesn't really matter to me.
If you have issues getting a client to spend $160 on a hardware appliance with 1 year of support, then either you are doing a bad job or your client is too cheap to be worthwhile. I know its fun to make fun of an open source company with some attitude issues, but let's get real here.
That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is that you're paying too much for meh hardware with a lousy warranty. It's not like we're in a binary world where the only options are "cheap freeloader" and "sucker", it's just that those seem to be the only two options if you want to play in the pfsense ecosystem instead of going with something else. My issue with recommending them as a hardware provider is that I can either pay less and install redundant hardware to mitigate failures, or pay more and get support from a company that actually has a global support footprint, and I don't see what value is being added by netgate. AFAICT the SG-1100 gives you
1 year of hardware warranty, and you can only extend that to two years if you prepay (so not a lot of flexibility), and it doesn't include software support at all. For software support, you can maybe pay $350/yr, but it isn't clear whether that's even possible for your $160 SG-1100 or if you have to jump up to the $350 SG-3100 before they'll take your money. (The spec pages list "Professional, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus" as support options for the SG-3100, but don't list any support options for the SG-1100.) At the $350/yr level the SLA for a response is basically next day. If you jump to $1500/yr you can call them and get down to 4 hours for a response, or you can get the same SLA for $1900/yr with hardware from a hardware company. So maybe the value-add is avoiding the $400/yr tax on using 3rd party hardware?