RT-AC68U

I use an old Asus RT-AC68 and another one at my beach place with an OpenVPN tunnel between them. Same subnet but split tunnel so internet traffic doesn’t go over it. Independent DHCP scopes so one side is 10.0.0.x and the other is 10.0.1.x. Work laptop is on a port that has been put on the guest WiFi VLAN so it can’t see my LAN. Gotta love the Merlin firmware. All works perfectly. Fast enough for gigabit fiber, WiFi is great, and I know the config inside and out. No need to upgrade.

50 devices says nothing. Let's take it slow: my low cost asus router does like 50 devices plus 2 cameras with low bandwidth usage. No issues. So explain first how many bandwidth consuming devices you got. 30 cams or 3? Second, routers came in 2 flavors, consumer and business. If you want lot of devices with ip reservation buy a used pro AP or router. Any advice on consumer router is a joke, even the *gaming* ones. Regarding consumer ones, my config started with ac68u from asus and worked steady on 60 square meters, now I've got mesh in a 250 sqm house, added a more powerful asus for coverage. Anyway, coverage is easy to diagnose ny rssi and router stats/logs. Start maybe here.

I ran pfSense for years and found it solid. I bought a replacement mini and partially configured it but didn't deploy until the SSD in my pfSense box died. I switched to OPNSense when I set up the new box. I can't say whether it's better or not as both did what I needed. As for H/W, the original used a Zotac ZBOX CI323 nano. When it neared ten years I purchased a replacement. Since the SSD (my first!) failed, I've put another SSD in it and run Linux on it. The new one runs on a GMKtec NucBox G2 which is way more processor/RAM/storage than needed for PNSense, but it wasn't expensive and has been OK so far. If OP means "wifi AP" by "router", I had an ASUS AC68W that worked well. After I upgraded to a TP-Link mesh (XE75) system I relegated it to IoT stuff. It recently gave up the ghost but in retrospect, it had been deteriorating for a while. And IAC I don;t think it can be purchased new any more.

Hell yeah Merlin. I still buy ASUS routers because of Merlin lol

RT-AC68U flashed with asuswrt-Merlin.  I had 2 of these in mesh mode with Ethernet backhaul for something like 10 years.

Asus RT-AC68U, these things just don't know how to die

You mention Asus here, and my impression is that Asus normally have a quite long support time for their products. The absence of a firmware update for a while, does not mean that the product is end of support. A driver behind why Asus normally have had quite good long term support over the last 10 years+, is at least the US FCC ruling where they where put under monitoring, after some bad handling of security issues back in 2013-2014. Take for an example the RT-AC68U that came on the market in 2013-2014 period. The latest firmware update is from october 2025, with fixes for multiple security issues. But then again, the newer RT-AC3200 have not received an software update in four years it seems. But in general, Asus seems to be of the better once in the consumer space when it comes to long term support.