DNS firewall that allows IoT firmware updates but blocks telemetry
Problem
After events like the LG TV wiretap scandal, privacy-conscious smart-home owners want devices that can still download firmware updates but are blocked from phoning home with telemetry. Standard DNS blocklists (Pi-hole etc.) are all-or-nothing: users must choose between breaking updates or allowing full manufacturer surveillance.
Opportunity
A DNS/network appliance or curated blocklist service with per-device rules that whitelists vendor update CDN endpoints while blocking telemetry endpoints — a maintainable, community-backed ruleset as a subscription or self-hosted product.
Market analysis
The pain is real and even academically documented (a PoPETs 2021 paper addresses exactly this allow-updates-block-telemetry problem), but the monetization premise is weak: the audience is r/selfhosted — the most self-sufficient, price-resistant population on the internet. NextDNS already supports per-device profiles with allow/denylists, and community-maintained per-vendor lists (like the LG TV blocklist on Level1Techs) get published for free whenever a scandal hits.
Market · Privacy-focused self-hosters and smart-home tinkerers; vocal and engaged demand, but small scale and culturally opposed to paying for what a forum post can approximate.
Pricing · Comparables set a low ceiling: Pi-hole is free/self-hosted, NextDNS is free with a ~$2/month Pro tier; a curated ruleset subscription would have to price at or below that.
Pros
- + Real, recurring pain — every new device and every vendor endpoint change re-triggers it.
- + Per-vendor curated rulesets are a genuine content moat if maintained better than scattered forum posts.
- + Self-hostable format (Pi-hole/AdGuard/NextDNS-compatible lists) fits the audience's tooling.
Cons
- − Permanent maintenance burden: vendors rotate telemetry and update endpoints with firmware releases, so the product is an unending ops job.
- − Community will replicate any good list for free, as the Level1Techs LG blocklist shows.
- − Hardcoded IP fallbacks (LG's updater famously bypasses DNS) mean DNS alone can't deliver the full promise.
Existing / similar tools
Source
r/selfhosted (Reddit)
The honest version of this product is a maintainer, not an appliance: the durable asset is a tested, versioned, per-vendor ruleset with CI that flags when a vendor’s endpoint map changes — closer to a security-intel feed than to a firewall product. Two truths kill the shinier versions: DNS-only blocking provably fails against hardcoded-IP fallbacks (the LG updater ships one), and any ruleset good enough to sell will be mirrored into a community GitHub repo within a week. Selling the maintenance pipeline (tested updates, device-profile packs, breakage reports) rather than the list itself is the only shape where the subscription maps to actual value.