Both firewall boxes our readers click most read “Currently unavailable” on Amazon this week, and that sets the tone for Black Friday networking deals in 2026. When a popular listing goes dark, a reseller can bring it back with a higher price and a fresh strikethrough. So the risk this season is not missing a discount. It is paying a marked-up price to a seller you never meant to buy from, while most homelab networking gear sits at its normal price.
We track 17 picks here: firewall boxes, travel routers, Wi-Fi 7 access points, 2.5GbE switches, 10GbE NICs and PoE switches. Each one comes from a buyer guide such as the pfSense and OPNsense hardware guide or the travel router guide, priced against what we logged while writing it. Every current price and seller below was checked in October 2026, on the 29th, against Amazon’s affiliate API and the brands’ own stores. Older figures carry their dates, so no verdict rests on a list price alone.
Networking deals worth buying now, and the ones to wait on
Four picks dropped to the lowest price we’ve recorded this month, and two of them are the cheap, unglamorous parts that hold a homelab network together. Three cost well above normal: the U7 Pro XG on Amazon, the SG3210X-M2 and the SG3210XHP-M2. The last one nearly doubled since June. On October 29 these verdicts held:
- Buy now: the MikroTik CRS310-8G+2S+IN 10GbE uplink switch sits at $191.80, under its $210 to $230 June price, from an importer.
- Buy now: the TP-Link TX401 copper 10GbE card, sold by Amazon, is at $60.00, the cheapest we have seen it.
- Buy now: the Grandstream GWN7672 Wi-Fi 7 access point is back at its $156.17 low, with 8 left in stock.
- Skip on Amazon: the Ubiquiti U7 Pro XG costs $258.80 from a reseller, and Ubiquiti’s own store sells it for $199.
- Do not pay: the TP-Link SG3210XHP-M2 PoE+ switch reads $385.80, against about $200 in June.
Black Friday is November 27 and Cyber Monday is November 30. Amazon had not announced its 2026 Black Friday window by October 26, and in 2023 to 2025 its sale started 7 or 8 days before Black Friday, according to a tally of Amazon’s past event dates. Walmart has already set its early event for November 12 to 15.
About three weeks remain before a likely Amazon start around November 19 or 20, so set alerts at the buy-below numbers in the table and do not treat today’s strikethroughs as the discount. If you are also shopping for the boxes behind the network, our Black Friday mini PC deals and the NAS and hard drive deals use the same method.
How these prices were tracked
Every Amazon price comes from Amazon’s Creators API, the product feed Amazon gives its affiliates, queried for the exact ASIN we link and the US buy box.
Each time we built or refreshed a networking guide, the reading went into its sourcing log with a date. That gives us readings from June through October for the switches and access points, and from September for the travel routers and NICs. A “lowest recorded” figure is the lowest in our logs, not an all-time low, and where a log only held a price band rather than a dated reading, the table says so.
Who holds the buy box matters more for networking gear than for most categories. Several picks here are sold by importers or resellers rather than the brand or Amazon, which can change the warranty, the power adapter in the box and the return path.
Specs come from the manufacturer pages logged in each hub guide. We did not re-test any hardware for this page and nothing here was run on a lab machine; the hands-on work lives in the guides it links to.
Deal price versus normal price for every pick
Read “normal” as the price most of our readings show, and “lowest” as a price somebody already paid. A Black Friday price is only a deal when it lands at or below the buy-below column, which sits close to the lowest reading or the brand’s own store price:
| Pick | Normal price | Lowest we recorded | Oct 29, 2026 | Buy below | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CWWK N100 4-port firewall, barebone | $355.91 (Amazon) | $252.93 (CWWK store, Oct 10) | $355.91 | $330 | Fair now |
| Protectli VP2420e | $359 (store, Oct) | $359 | US price unconfirmed | $359 | Only if you can wait |
| GL.iNet Beryl 7 | $129.99 | $129.99 | $129.99 | $115 | Wait |
| GL.iNet Beryl AX | $98.99 | $70 to $87 on sale (July log) | $98.99 | $85 | Wait |
| GL.iNet Slate 7 | $159.99 | $120 to $150 band (July log) | $159.99 | $140 | Wait |
| TP-Link Omada EAP772 | $169.99 | $150 to $170 band (July log), $159.99 (Sep 27) | $169.99 | $160 | Wait |
| Ubiquiti U7 Pro XG | $252 to $259 (Amazon) | $199 (Ubiquiti store) | $258.80 | $219 | Buy direct |
| Grandstream GWN7672 | $156 to $162 | $156.17 | $156.17, 8 left | $157 | Buy now |
| MikroTik CRS310-8G+2S+IN | $210 to $230 (June) | $191.80 | $191.80 | $195 | Buy now |
| MokerLink 2G08110GSM | $79.68 | $79.68 | $79.68 | $75 | Fair now |
| TP-Link SG3210X-M2 | $150 to $180 (June) | $150 to $180 band | $229.99 | $180 | Wait |
| TP-Link TX401 | $64.49 | $60.00 | $60.00 | $62 | Buy now |
| Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx | $85 to $87 | $84.99 (Sep 28) | $85.00 | $85 | Fair now |
| Intel I226-T1 | $75.23 | $75.23 | $75.23 | $65 | Wait |
| TP-Link SG3210XHP-M2 | about $200 (June) | $199.99 (June) | $385.80 | $250 | Skip |
| TP-Link TL-SG1008MP | $89.99 to $98.49 | $89.99 (Oct 21) | $98.49 | $90 | Wait |
| TP-Link TL-SG208PE | $69.99 | $62.99 | $62.99 | $63 | Buy now |
Two patterns stand out. The cheap, single-purpose parts (the TX401, the TL-SG208PE, the GWN7672) drifted down in October. TP-Link’s multi-gig Omada switches went the other way, and the PoE model nearly doubled. The travel routers have not moved at all since September, and a flat price in late October tells you nothing about what Black Friday week will bring, so those are the ones to put on an alert rather than buy today.
Firewall boxes for pfSense and OPNsense
Stock risk is highest on the firewall shelf this year. Our two most-clicked firewall listings, the MeLE QuieterDL (16GB RAM and a 512GB SSD, $535.99 through early October) and the six-port Dozlzyp i3-N305 barebone ($337.84 on October 18), both read “Currently unavailable” on October 29.
We have pulled those links rather than send you to a listing with no buy box, which is exactly where relisted, marked-up offers turn up. What’s left is a choice between a cheap barebone and a box from a vendor that answers the phone, and the checks below decide which way you go:
- The listing names Intel i226-V NICs, which FreeBSD’s igc driver handles without patches.
- The seller is the brand itself, not an unnamed reseller of the same model.
- The price you compare is barebone against barebone, because memory now costs more than the box.
Memory is the 2026 trap, at least on the N150 F8 this week. CWWK’s own store priced its F8 with an N150, 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD at $933.43 on October 29, against $393.33 for the same box barebone, so the memory and SSD add $540.10. A DDR5 SO-DIMM you already own is worth more than any Black Friday coupon on a configured firewall.
CWWK four-port N100 barebone
CWWK’s N100 barebone is the cheaper of the two four-port CWWK barebones still in stock. CWWK’s own store sold the N100 F8 barebone for $252.93 on October 10, but every N100 configuration there was sold out on October 29, and the cheapest F8 left was the N150 barebone at $393.33. CWWK’s four-port N100 barebone on Amazon, sold by CWWK, read $355.91 on September 16 and again on October 29, which now makes it the lower-cost way into the same class of hardware.
An N100 with four 2.5GbE ports routes a gigabit or 2.5-gig WAN with room left for WireGuard, which is all most homes ask of a firewall.
The $375.91 strikethrough on the Amazon listing is not a price we have ever seen it sell at, so ignore the “5% off” badge. Our buy-below line is $330, and at $355.91 it is fair if you need a firewall before December. The OPNsense vs pfSense install on a mini PC walks through the first boot. Check the CWWK N100 four-port barebone on Amazon.
Protectli VP2420e
Protectli is the pick when support and firmware provenance matter more than price. The VP2420e runs a Celeron J6412 with four 2.5GbE ports, offers coreboot as an option and comes with US-based support, and it listed at $359 on Protectli’s store in October while on backorder. That backorder is the problem for Black Friday: a discount on a box that ships in January does not help a router that dies in November.
Our host was redirected to Protectli’s EU store on October 29, which showed the VP2420e as out of stock, so we could not confirm a US price that day. Treat $359 as the number to beat and do not buy one from a third-party marketplace seller, because the support you are paying for comes from Protectli. If you need pfSense Plus with vendor support instead, Netgate’s store had the 4200 MAX at $829 with its basic support tier included on October 29.
Travel routers for WireGuard and Tailscale
GL.iNet travel routers are the most clicked picks after firewalls, and their prices have been the most stable on this page. Every GL.iNet listing we track is sold by GL.iNet’s own Amazon storefront, which removes the seller risk. None of them moved between September 26 and October 29.
Two GL.iNet models sit outside the picks below. The Brume 2 wired VPN gateway sat at $89.99 and the Flint 2 home router at $169.99 the whole time, though our log shows the Flint 2 selling for $113 to $127 in late 2025, so it has room to fall.
GL.iNet Beryl 7 (GL-MT3600BE)
The Beryl 7 is the travel router we would carry, with Wi-Fi 7 on two bands, a 2.5GbE WAN, a 2.5GbE LAN and GL.iNet’s rated WireGuard speed of up to 1,100 Mbps. It has read $129.99 in every log since September 26, so there is no low to wait for yet, only the hope of a first discount.
No 6 GHz radio is fitted and channels top out at 160 MHz, which rarely matters when the bottleneck is a hotel uplink. If you travel before December, $129.99 is a fair price for what it does. Otherwise set an alert at $115 and wait for Black Friday week. Check the live Beryl 7 price on Amazon.
GL.iNet Beryl AX (GL-MT3000)
As the budget travel router, the Beryl AX has been cheaper than this before. It reads $98.99 on Amazon, but our July log records sale prices between $70 and $87, which makes it the most likely travel router here to drop on Black Friday. GL.iNet rates it at 300 Mbps for WireGuard, enough for most hotel and conference links but about a quarter of the Beryl 7’s figure.
Set the alert at $85. At $98.99, the extra $31 for the Beryl 7 buys Wi-Fi 7, a second 2.5GbE port and more than triple the VPN throughput, so the AX only wins once it’s back in the $70s or $80s. Check the live Beryl AX price on Amazon.
GL.iNet Slate 7 (GL-BE3600)
The Slate 7 adds a touchscreen and two 2.5GbE ports to Wi-Fi 7, and it costs $30 more than the Beryl 7 at $159.99. Our July log had it in a $120 to $150 band, so the current price is the top of what it has sold for. GL.iNet corrected its WireGuard rating for this model to about 490 Mbps, well under the Beryl 7’s figure.
Buy it for the screen and the second 2.5GbE port, not for speed. Below $140 it is a reasonable buy, and above that the Beryl 7 is the better router for less money. Check the live Slate 7 price on Amazon.
Wi-Fi 7 access points
Access points carry the clearest seller risk on this page, because three of the five we track are sold by resellers rather than the brand or Amazon. The budget TP-Link EAP723 reads $89.98 from a reseller with 2 units left, and the Zyxel NWA110BE holds at $139.99 from Zyxel itself. Before you buy any of the three below, check these on the listing:
- The title says whether a power adapter is included, since most ship for PoE only.
- Your switch port supplies 802.3at PoE+, because all three draw more than 802.3af allows.
- The seller is Amazon, the brand, or a reseller you can name, with a return window shown.
TP-Link Omada EAP772
The EAP772 is our best-value Wi-Fi 7 access point, and it is sold by Amazon itself at $169.99. That price has mostly held at $169.99 since July, with one $159.99 reading on the US product page on September 27. It is tri-band BE11000 with 320 MHz channels on 6 GHz, a 2.5GbE uplink and a maximum draw of 25.4W on PoE+, and it runs on TP-Link’s free self-hosted Omada controller.
Wait for $160 or less, a price the US product page already showed once in September, so it is not a wishful number. Check the live EAP772 price on Amazon.
Ubiquiti U7 Pro XG
No pick on this page shows an Amazon price you should not pay more clearly. The U7 Pro XG with its 10GbE uplink reads $258.80 on Amazon from a third-party seller, while Ubiquiti’s own store lists it at $199, or $219 including the surcharge the store shows next to it. That is $39.80 to $59.80 more on Amazon for the same access point, with the warranty claim going through a reseller instead of Ubiquiti.
Buy it direct if you already run UniFi. If the Amazon listing ever drops to $219 or less, the Amazon return policy is worth the difference, so we have left the U7 Pro XG Amazon listing here for comparison. Our Wi-Fi 7 access point guide compares it with the Omada and Grandstream options on controller lock-in.
Grandstream GWN7672
The GWN7672 is the one access point at its low today. It read $156.17 on September 25, rose to $161.66 by October 10, and fell back to $156.17 on October 29. It is tri-band BE11000 with confirmed 320 MHz support, two 5GbE ports and an embedded controller that manages up to 50 access points without any cloud account, which is why it suits a homelab that keeps management off the internet.
A reseller, Prime Electronics USA, holds the buy box with 8 units left, and the title says no power adapter is included. If your switch supplies PoE+, buy it now. If it does not, add a PoE+ injector to the cost before you compare it with the EAP772. Check the live GWN7672 price on Amazon.
2.5GbE and 10GbE switches
Multi-gig switches split into two groups this season. MikroTik and MokerLink are flat or down, and TP-Link’s Omada L2+ models are well above where they sat in June. The MikroTik CRS305-1G-4S+IN, the all-SFP+ fiber aggregation switch, reads $136.80 against $138.50 on October 18 and $149 at MikroTik’s store in June, with a $169.99 strikethrough on the Amazon listing that we have never seen it sell at.
MikroTik CRS310-8G+2S+IN
The CRS310 is the homelab default for eight 2.5GbE ports with two 10G SFP+ uplinks, and at $191.80 it is the lowest we’ve recorded. In June the listing sat between $210 and $230, and ServeTheHome put its list price at $219. It runs RouterOS v7 or SwOS on a Marvell switch chip, has a fan and draws up to 34W.
Read the seller line before you order. The buy box belongs to an importer called GETIC., and the listing title is in French, which points to a unit sourced for the European market. MikroTik switches are the same hardware worldwide, but the power adapter’s plug and the warranty path can differ, so confirm the adapter type in the listing or plan to use your own 24V supply. If that checks out, it is the best switch deal on this page. Check the live CRS310 price on Amazon.
MokerLink 2G08110GSM
For people who don’t want RouterOS, the MokerLink 2G08110GSM gives you eight 2.5GbE ports, a single 10G SFP+ uplink and a plain web interface for VLANs, fanless, at $79.68. That price has not changed since October 10 and matches MokerLink’s own $79.99, so there is no deal yet and no premium either.
You trade one SFP+ port instead of two, so you can uplink to a NAS or a firewall at 10G, not both. At under $80 from the brand’s own storefront it is a fair price today, and an alert at $75 catches any Black Friday cut. Check the live MokerLink price on Amazon.
TP-Link Omada SG3210X-M2
The SG3210X-M2 is the silent, fanless option with the same eight 2.5GbE plus two SFP+ layout as the CRS310, managed from the Omada controller. It sold in a $150 to $180 band in June and reads $229.99 today from Blazing Network US, a reseller.
Silence is worth paying for in a living room rack, but not $38 more than the CRS310’s current price for the same port layout. Wait for $180 or less, which is back inside its June band, and buy the CRS310 if your switch can live in a closet. Our 2.5GbE and 10GbE switch guide covers the noise and power figures behind that call. Check the live SG3210X-M2 price on Amazon.
10GbE and 2.5GbE network cards
NICs are where fakes and look-alike listings cause the most trouble, because the chip on the card decides which driver Proxmox or FreeBSD loads and a cloned card can carry a different one. Genuine Intel X710-DA2 cards read $149.00 from a reseller on October 29, while a 10Gtek X710 clone sold for $109.99 in September, and that $39 gap is the price of knowing what you are getting.
The 10Gtek X520-DA2, a dual SFP+ card on Intel’s 82599ES chip, reads $59.99 against $57.99 on September 28, a fair price for the safest 10GbE driver on Linux. The three cards below are the ones with a price story this season.
TP-Link TX401
The TX401 is the deal of the NIC shelf: 10GbE over the RJ45 copper you already ran, sold by Amazon itself, at $60.00. It read $64.49 on September 28, and the Amazon listing’s $99.99 strikethrough is a figure we never saw it sell at, so the real saving is $4.49, not the 40% badge.
Chips vary by revision: early cards carry an Aquantia AQC107 and current ones an AQC113, both on the Linux atlantic driver. TP-Link publishes no power figure for it and cools it with a passive heatsink, so give it a slot with some airflow. At $60 we would buy now. Our 10GbE NIC guide for Proxmox has the driver checks to run once it’s in. Check the live TX401 price on Amazon.
Mellanox ConnectX-4 Lx (MCX4121A-ACAT)
Buy this one if you might move to 25GbE later. The MCX4121A-ACAT has two SFP28 ports that run at 10 or 25 Gbps on the mlx5_core driver, with SR-IOV, and it read $84.99 on September 28, $87.00 on October 27 and $85.00 on October 29.
Check the part number in the listing before you pay. The ACAT suffix is the 25G-capable card, while the similar-looking MCX4121A-XCAT is 10G only. Three different sellers have held this listing’s buy box since September, so check the seller’s return window too. At $85 it is fair, and our readings have stayed within $2 of that for a month. Check the live ConnectX-4 Lx price on Amazon.
Intel I226-T1
The I226-T1 is the genuine Intel 2.5GbE card for adding a port to a firewall or a server, sold by Amazon at $75.23. That is above Intel’s own recommended customer price of $62 to $64, which is why this one is a wait rather than a buy.
Buy the genuine card for a firewall rather than an unbranded i226 board, because the Intel listing tells you exactly which part you’re getting and FreeBSD’s igc driver supports it. If you see link drops after install, our guide to fixing Intel i226 drops on OPNsense walks through the power-saving settings and stale firmware behind most of them. Set an alert at $65. Check the live I226-T1 price on Amazon.
PoE switches for cameras and access points
PoE switch pricing went in opposite directions this month. The budget models are flat or down, the 16-port TP-Link TL-SG1218MP holds at $159.99 against a $185.99 strikethrough, and the multi-gig PoE model has nearly doubled since June. Size the budget first, then shop: the PoE+ access points above each draw 22W to 25.4W, so two of them plus a couple of cameras is already more than a 64W switch can carry.
TP-Link TL-SG208PE
For PoE+ and VLANs on one small switch, nothing here costs less. The TL-SG208PE has eight gigabit ports, all PoE+ at up to 30W each, a 64W total budget and 802.1Q VLANs, and it is sold by Amazon at $62.99, down from $69.99 on September 29.
64W runs two access points or four to six cameras, not both. It had only 8 reviews when we priced it, so it has less of a track record than TP-Link’s older Easy Smart switches, and if you only need VLANs without PoE the Omada ES208G does that for $29.99. At $62.99 it is the lowest we’ve recorded, so buy now if the budget fits your devices. Our cheap VLAN switch roundup covers how to set its PVIDs. Check the live TL-SG208PE price on Amazon.
TP-Link TL-SG1008MP
The TL-SG1008MP is the unmanaged step up in power, with eight PoE+ ports and a budget Amazon’s listing gives as 126W. It is sold by Amazon at $98.49 today, $8.50 more than the $89.99 it read on October 21, and it has a fan.
PoE budget depends on the hardware revision: TP-Link’s spec page lists 153W for some revisions, while the listing title says 126W, so plan around 126W unless the box in hand says otherwise. It has already sold at $89.99 this month, so wait for that. Our PoE switch guide shows how many cameras each budget actually powers. Check the live TL-SG1008MP price on Amazon.
TP-Link Omada SG3210XHP-M2
We would recommend this switch at the right price and refuse it at today’s. The SG3210XHP-M2 has eight 2.5GbE ports, all PoE+, with a 240W budget and two 10G SFP+ uplinks, which is exactly what a rack of Wi-Fi 7 access points needs. It read $199.99 on one pass in June, $385.80 on October 10, and $385.80 again on October 29, sold by a reseller.
Today’s price is $185.81 over the June reading, a 93% rise, on a listing that is no longer sold by TP-Link or Amazon. Don’t buy it here. Pair the CRS310 with a separate PoE+ switch for the access points, or set an alert at $250 and wait for the listing to return to a first-party seller.
Discounts that hide a worse purchase
None of the bad deals we found this month were scams in the usual sense. Each one was a real price shown against a reference that never existed, or sold through a channel that quietly changes what you get. These are the patterns from our October readings:
- No reading in our logs matched the strikethroughs on the TX401 ($99.99), the CRS305 ($169.99), the CWWK box ($375.91) or the CRS310 ($230.30).
- Resellers hold the buy box on the U7 Pro XG, the SG3210X-M2, the SG3210XHP-M2 and the GWN7672, and the first three cost more than their earlier or direct prices.
- A foreign-language title, like the CRS310’s, marks a unit built for another market, so the power adapter plug needs checking.
- Access points sold “without DC adapter” need PoE+ from the switch or an injector, and that cost belongs in the comparison.
- Memory and storage added $540.10 to a CWWK N150 F8 on its maker’s own store, so barebone prices are the ones to compare.
Out-of-stock listings deserve the most suspicion of all. When the MeLE QuieterDL or the Dozlzyp box comes back before Black Friday, check that the seller and the configuration in the title match what they were (the MeLE at 16GB and 512GB, the Dozlzyp as a six-port barebone). A popular ASIN that returns under a new seller at a higher price with a fresh strikethrough is the most common fake deal in this category.
Checks before you pay for networking gear
Run these on any Black Friday networking deal, in this order, before it goes in the cart. Each one is something we checked on every listing above, and each has caught at least one bad price this month:
- The price is at or below the buy-below column, not just below the strikethrough.
- The “Sold by” line names the brand, Amazon, or a reseller whose return window you can see.
- The title matches the exact model and configuration you researched, down to the suffix.
- The brand’s own store does not sell it for less, as Ubiquiti’s does for the U7 Pro XG.
- The power adapter, PoE budget and plug type cover the devices you’ll connect.
- For NICs and firewall boxes, the chip named in the listing is one your OS driver supports.
If a listing fails any of these, close the tab and set an alert instead. The GL.iNet routers, the EAP772 and the I226-T1 have the most room to fall before November 27. The MikroTik CRS310, the TX401, the GWN7672 and the TL-SG208PE are already at the prices we would want to see on Black Friday.
