A private library on your network
Edge and Vault add SMB file sharing, Jellyfin direct play and DLNA. Your media stays in the house.
30-day home trial — full refund if it isn't right. Details →
Try it at home
The 30-day home trial. Try Shield on your own network for 30 days. If it isn't right for your home, send it back — prepaid label, full refund.
See pricing & the trialFounding Edition · 17 of 20 remaining
Take your home network back.
One small box behind your modem that protects every phone, laptop and TV in the house — and can add a private media library, encrypted backups and travel Wi-Fi. All on your own network, never in someone else's cloud.
Ads on the smart TV. Adult sites the kids shouldn't be on. Trackers following the kids around the web. Phishing emails pretending to be the bank. WOMBATS Shield sits behind your modem and quietly blocks the lot for every phone, laptop, tablet, TV and smart speaker on your network. If you want more, the same Shield family adds a private media library, encrypted backups for the computers in the house, and a travel Wi-Fi network you can take on holiday. No app to install on each device. No subscription. Nothing about your home leaves your home.
Protection from $449 · media and per-device rules from $549 · the full Vault $749. Buy once. Founding price locked in for life.
Free AU/NZ dispatch · GST inclusive · 30-day home trial · International by Express courier.
Protects every device
No app, no subscription
Nothing leaves your home
Designed and engineered in Australia
What Shield does
A small appliance that quietly does more than blocking.
Network protection is the foundation. The Shield family also adds a private media library, encrypted backups for the computers in your house, and a travel Wi-Fi network you can take on holiday. None of it goes through anyone else's cloud.
Stream without an account
Compatible TVs and players see your library locally. No cloud login. No catalog telemetry.
Backups that stay home
Encrypted local storage that any computer in the house can back up to over SMB, with first-class Time Machine support for Macs. Backups never leave your network.
A travel router in your bag
Vault joins the hotel or Airbnb Wi-Fi and gives you a calm, filtered Wi-Fi network of your own — no cable needed.
What you'll notice
The difference, in the first week.
Some of it is obvious on day one. Some of it is invisible by design, a phishing page you never reach doesn't announce itself, so the dashboard keeps the count for you.
The TV, minus the ads
Ads disappear in places you could never block them before, the smart TV, free games, cheap apps.
Lighter, quicker pages
Fewer pop-ups and trackers, so everyday browsing feels cleaner and loads a little faster.
A number that makes it real
The dashboard shows how many ads, trackers and threats Shield blocked. Worth a look on day two.
Quieter for the kids
Adult content doesn't load, SafeSearch stays on, and you can pause a device at dinner from your phone.
For parents: the under-16 law, practically →Why this exists
Most home networks have quietly become someone else's territory.
The router phones home to a vendor cloud. The “protection” is a subscription that watches the same traffic it claims to protect. The data drifts off the property. We built Shield because we wanted the thing on our own networks, and we couldn't find one we trusted.
Shield is a small, calm appliance that takes care of filtering, parental controls, ad, tracker and adult-content blocking, and (if you want it) private storage, media, backups and travel Wi‑Fi. Then it stays quiet. Buy it once. Own it. Keep it for years.
Read the long versionA different approach
Everything starts on your network.
- No vendor cloud control plane
- No traffic profiling, ever
- No remote control by us
- Filter lists update over the internet, control does not
How it fits
Sits behind your modem. Wi-Fi stays the same.
Shield connects to your existing modem over Ethernet. Your phones, laptops and TVs keep using the Wi-Fi they already use. Setup is a 15-minute conversation with a friendly browser page on your home network.
Live, on your network
See exactly what Shield is doing, quietly.
No telemetry leaves your house. The dashboard runs on Shield itself, on your network. Pause a device, exclude a category, or just leave it alone for months.
At a glance
Today's blocks across every device, in one quiet view.
Each device, on its own terms
Pause the kids' iPad without touching the rest of the house.
Tune protection to your household
Choose what to filter, and what to leave alone.
Don't take our word for it.
Run a third-party check before and after you plug Shield in. Results may vary depending on your network.
Modem Autopilot
It recognises your modem and sets itself up.
No terminal, no DNS, no settings pages. Plug Shield in, join the Wi-Fi network it broadcasts from your phone, press one button, and Modem Autopilot recognises your modem and configures protection for you — usually in a couple of minutes, with nothing to look up or type in. Every Shield sets up this way, and you're behind filtering from the first minute. Brought your own modem? It probably just works; and if it's not recognised yet, send it to us in one tap and we'll add it.
Works with the modems in most Australian homes
From every major Australian internet provider, plus the popular retail brands — more than 40 models recognised today, and the list grows every week.
Providers
TelstraOptusTPGiiNetInternodeAussie BroadbandBelongVodafoneDodoiPrimusMateSuperloopExetelSpintel
Modem brands
TP-LinkNetgearASUSD-LinkHuaweiSagemcomNetCommTechnicolorNokiaZTEArcadyanSercomm
Powered by the WOMBATS Universal Modem Engine.
Pick your Shield
Three Shields. One simple choice.
All three Shields share the same calm, local-first foundation. Edge and Vault add storage, media and travel features.
Shield Core
Quiet, network-wide protection.
$449
For most homes
Founding price · standard from unit 61: $599
- Ad, tracker, adult-content and threat blocking for every device
- SafeSearch and per-device controls
- Local web management. No cloud login
Shield Edge
Core + a private media library.
$549
For media-heavy households
Founding price · standard from unit 61: $689
- Everything in Core, plus per-device rules
- SafeSearch, app blocking & schedules per device
- SMB file sharing, Jellyfin direct play and DLNA
Shield Vault
Edge + encrypted backups + travel Wi-Fi.
$749
For prosumers & frequent travellers
Founding price · standard from unit 61: $939
- Everything in Edge
- Encrypted SSD with Time Machine support
- Cable-free travel Wi-Fi — joins hotel wireless
At the founding price, a Shield Core costs less than three years of one parental-control app — and in year four it keeps filtering at $0.
From $449 · Founding price locked for life · 30-day home trial
A note from the founder
Built by someone who wanted it on his own network.
I'm an electronics engineer who started using computers in the late 1980s and wrote my first program in 1990. WOMBATS Shield is the device I wanted in my own house, a small piece of equipment that protects every device on the network from one place, on hardware you own, with rules you can read for yourself. No account. No subscription. No cloud.
Khalid · Founder, WOMBATS Shield
Read the full storyIn the box
A piece of hardware you'll keep on your shelf.
The first thing you'll notice is the box.
Open and ready in minutes.
Shield, power, Ethernet, founding card.
A promise that matters
If we disappear, your Shield keeps working.
There is no required activation server. No cloud login that can be turned off. No subscription that lapses. A big vendor can switch a device off from its cloud; Shield has no such switch to flip. The filter lists Shield uses are public and continue updating without us. The only thing you lose if WOMBATS as a company goes away is us, not your network.
That's the whole pitch. Everything else on this page is detail.
- No required cloud login
- No activation server
- No vendor-controlled DNS path
- Public filter lists keep updating
- Local UI keeps running, forever
Common questions
The questions buyers ask before they reserve.
Where does my data live?+
On your network. Filtering and management run on the Shield itself. There is no vendor cloud control plane and no telemetry pipeline back to us.
What if WOMBATS goes away?+
Your Shield keeps working. There is no required activation server, no cloud login, and no monthly fee. Filter lists are public and can keep updating without us.
Will it work behind my modem?+
Yes. Shield connects behind your existing modem over Ethernet. Your Wi-Fi stays the same. Setup typically takes about 15 minutes from a browser on your home network.
Can someone on my network bypass it?+
Shield blocks common encrypted-DNS bypass paths and Apple Private Relay at the network level. A determined user on a managed device can still tunnel out. You'll see them.
What if I want to remove it?+
Nothing Shield does is permanent. To protect every device, it takes over one job from your modem, handing out network addresses. To go back, you remove Shield and factory-reset your modem, a standard button-press, and you're exactly where you started. No lock-in, and every Shield has a 30-day home trial.
Does it slow down my internet?+
No measurable difference for everyday use. DNS filtering adds microseconds per lookup — far less than the variance in your internet connection itself. Most households notice pages load slightly faster once ad and tracker requests stop going out.
What does protection really cost over time?+
Most families pay for protection by the month and never total it up. A leading parental-control app is $159.95 a year at Australian pricing — about $480 over three years, $800 over five. A typical family stack (a premium app, a DNS service and one ISP add-on) runs about $300 a year. An all-in-one US family bundle converts to roughly $576 a year or more, renewing forever. A Shield Core is $449 at the founding price, bought once — less than three years of that single app. There is no subscription behind these numbers. A Shield keeps filtering in year four and year ten at $0, and it keeps working even if WOMBATS doesn't. The full comparison tables, with the date we checked the prices, are on the Why WOMBATS page.
Competitor prices are public list prices, checked July 2026; converted figures are approximate.
No reviews yet. Here's what we offer instead.
Shield is new, and the founding batch is 20 numbered units — so there are no five-star ratings to show you. What we can offer: a 30-day home trial on your own network, a 12-month warranty alongside Australian Consumer Law, signed software updates you can verify, and a founder who answers his own email. When the first owner reviews exist, they'll be published here, unedited.
Founding Edition · 17 of 20 remaining
Order your founding Shield.
One simple choice. One device. One quiet network. Founding price locked in for life.