You can load models for Frigate yourself, and the documentation tells you how to do it, but the recommended Frigate+ models are easier to use. For example, downloading and configuring YOLO-NAS becomes just copying and pasting a plus:// URL when you’re signed in to Frigate+.

As another example, I would consider GitLab not to be free because GitLab is a for-profit company, the open source version of GitLab intentionally lacks features that would be particularly useful to business users, and you can pay GitLab to get those features in a special GitLab distribution distributed under difference licensing terms. If GitLab had a plugin model, and unaffiliated developers created paid plugins for those features, then I think GitLab itself could be considered free. But if paid plugins were developed by the same developers, would that make it not free again?

More strange examples:

• Redis, which relicensed to a non-Free license in 2024, but would have still been usable by most people who are self hosting. Redis is available under AGPL since 2025.
• All Hashicorp software, such as Terraform and Vault, which relicensed to a non-Free license in 2023, but is still usable for most people who are self hosting.
• Docker, which is only free on Linux since it relicensed in 2022. Docker Engine only runs on Linux, but the closed-source Docker Desktop runs Docker Engine in a Linux VM and wraps the API to make it almost seamless on Windows and Mac OS, and for that you may need to pay a subscription.

I guess to me it seems like there’s this gray area where you start having to think about intention and whether the software is really intended to be usable for the purposes that people in this community will want to use it for without having to pay the person doing the promoting.

Are Home Assistant and Frigate exempted? Home Assistant is free and open source and you can self host it, but there is a built-in feature where you can pay a subscription to use Nabu Casa’s ingress server and cloud GPUs, and many of the integrations are only useful if you have paid money for some piece of hardware or have a subscription to a cloud service. Frigate is free and open source, but it has built-in support for specially packaged computer vision models that are offered for a fee that supports the project. I wouldn’t consider either application crippleware, but you can pay money to people who are affiliated with the project for a direct benefit that is related to the software.

Gamers Nexus already has benchmarks out. My interpretation is that the performance is about what you would expect for a modern console, and the cost is about what you would expected to have gotten this kind of performance a few years ago. It’s not powerful by today’s PC standards, and you could have gotten a more powerful PC for less last year, but because of ongoing global economic collapse it’s competitively priced. If you weren’t fortunate enough to buy a computer shortly before companies started wasting all the manufacturing capacity on “AI” and you want to have a very compact and quiet computer with just okay gaming performance, it might be worth getting.

They said something about Netgear claiming to have removed the ability to administer your own device over SSH in the name of security, but that the option could still be turned on by sending some special network request.

Maybe you can issue some sort of note so that people don’t need to carry around bars of gold and scales. That sounds really inconvenient.

KDE Connect can do all three of these.