Local‑first, by architecture.
Filtering decisions happen on the device on your network. The dashboard runs on the device. There is no vendor cloud control plane sitting between you and your own protection.
Take your home network back.
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.
WOMBATS Shield is a calm, sovereign appliance that runs on your network, not in someone else's cloud. Filtering, parental controls, ad, tracker and adult-content blocking, and (if you want it) private storage, media, backups and travel Wi‑Fi. Buy it once. Own it. Keep it for years.
What we mean by “sovereign networking”.
Buy once. Own it.
Network protection should not be rented. Shield is a piece of hardware. You pay for it once. There is no monthly fee, no feature unlock, no “professional tier” behind a paywall.
Sovereign, your data stays on your side of the door.
We don't ship your traffic to a vendor cloud for inspection. We don't collect query logs, browsing history, or behavioural profiles back to us.
Long‑lived, by design.
If WOMBATS as a company disappears, your Shield keeps working. There is no required activation server, no cloud login that can lapse, no subscription that can stop. Filter lists are public.
Calm, not hacker.
No green-on-black dashboards. No fearmongering. No countdown timers. A calm appliance that takes care of the network and lets you forget it's there.
Honest about boundaries.
We'll tell you where Shield protects, where it deliberately stops, and what we're still working on. Hedging less, claiming less, meaning more.
The maths
What protection really costs over time.
“Network protection should not be rented” is a principle, but it is also arithmetic. People routinely underestimate what they spend on subscriptions, so the sums below are spelled out rather than assumed.
| Service | Per year | Over 3 years | Over 5 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Qustodio CompleteLeading parental-control app, Australian pricing | $159.95 | $479.85 | $799.75 |
| Bark PremiumUS parental-control app, billed in USD, converted | from ≈ $150 | from ≈ $450 | from ≈ $750 |
| eero PlusRequired for eero's content filtering and SafeSearch | $159.99 | $480 + hardware (from $199) | $800 + hardware |
| Telstra Device SecurityMcAfee-based add-on, billed $10/mth, up to 10 devices | $120 | $360 | $600 |
| Aura FamilyAll-in-one US family bundle, annual billing, converted | from ≈ $576 | from ≈ $1,728 | from ≈ $2,880 |
| A typical combined stackPremium app + DNS service + one ISP add-on | ≈ $300 | ≈ $900 | ≈ $1,500 |
| Shield Core — bought onceNo subscription, ever | — | $449 founding · $599 standard from unit 61 | $449 — nothing more to pay |
Three years of Qustodio Complete at Australian pricing is $479.85. A Shield Core at the founding price is $449, bought once — less than the three-year subscription. Five years of the same app is $799.75; a Shield Vault, with encrypted storage and travel Wi-Fi on top, is $749. Against a typical combined stack at about $300 a year, a Shield Core pays for itself in around 18 months.
| Product | 3-year cost | What that includes |
|---|---|---|
| Gryphon AX with Premium Protection | ≈ $854 | Hardware plus three years of its optional Premium Protection subscription (US$89.99/yr), converted; basic parental controls are free. Doesn't ship to Australia. |
| Bark Home with Bark Premium | ≈ $875 | Network device plus Bark's separate Premium monitoring plan (US$14/mo, optional), converted. Ships only within the US. |
| eero 6+ (single) with eero Plus | ≈ $729 | Australian retail hardware ($249) plus three years of eero Plus, which its content filtering requires. |
| TP-Link Deco X50 (3-pack) with HomeShield Total Security | ≈ $890 | Australian retail hardware plus three years of the optional full security tier, converted. |
| WOMBATS Shield | from $449, once (founding) | No subscription — in year one or year ten. |
Competitor prices are public list prices, checked July 2026; converted USD figures are approximate. Where a price depends on platform or billing period, the lowest published rate is shown ("from"). Subscription products can change price or plan structure at any time.
The Australian picture is worth spelling out. Telstra removed its free Broadband Protect network filter in 2023; the device-security add-on it sells today costs $120 a year. Optus closed WiFi Secure to new customers in July 2025 and shut it down entirely in March 2026. Family Zone's consumer product was folded into Qustodio, whose parent company Qoria is being acquired by the US subscription company Aura (announced February 2026). Australian households now average about $78 a month on entertainment subscriptions alone, and 78% say they worry about the cumulative cost (Deloitte Media & Entertainment Consumer Insights, 2025). As far as we can find, there is no other Australian-owned, no-subscription, network-level family protection product on sale today.
There is one more line in the ledger: what happens when the company behind a product moves on. Circle discontinued its Home Plus hardware after an acquisition and folded the product into subscription software, leaving the boxes people had bought without a successor. Winston Privacy shut down in 2021, ending support and updates for the devices it had sold. Shield runs locally — no activation server, no cloud login, nothing that can lapse.
Comparing Shield with a specific product?
We’ve written the honest, side-by-side versions: Shield vs Firewalla, Shield vs Pi-hole and Shield vs Synology. Each one tells you honestly who should buy the other product.
Built on trusted open technology, then carefully hardened.
We'd rather tell you what's in Shield than pretend we wrote it all from scratch. Shield runs on Raspberry Pi 5 silicon (2 GB on Core and Edge, 4 GB on Vault) with a Debian 12 base. The DNS-layer filtering engine is AdGuard Home, but every default that conflicted with our privacy or security goals has been disabled, restricted or redesigned. nftables enforces network policy on the device. Software bundles are signed and verified before they're applied. The encrypted partitions are unlocked at boot through a hardware-assisted key path on a real ATECC secure element, bound to the device. On Shield Vault, the storage SSD adds a user passphrase and a recovery key alongside the auto-unlock, three independent ways in.
The full architectural story is on the security page.
Who Shield is for.
Households, privacy-first professionals, small offices, sovereignty-conscious buyers, prosumers, and travellers, Shield fits more lives than you might think. We tell each story properly on the use-cases page, with the desks, lounge rooms and hotel-rooms that go with each.
See who Shield is forIf we disappear, your Shield keeps working.
Shield does not require an activation server, a cloud login, or a subscription to keep filtering. The filter lists it uses are public and continue updating without us. The dashboard is on the device, on your network. The hardware is real, repairable Raspberry Pi 5 silicon. The only thing you lose if WOMBATS as a company goes away is us, not your network.