PFsense appliance in production? Have you used it?

Looking for a router for a single site1000 users (a client). We showed them Meraki (MX) and even tried it and they really liked all the cool security features etc. They hate the cost of Meraki licensing and suggested that we look at pfsense appliances (Like a real appliance from pfsense, not pfsense in random hardware) . Has anyone here deployed pfsense appliances and what was your experience with it? They want to use:

• IDS/IPS features of the appliance
• Mail spam filter
• WAN load-balancing, and failover
• VPN

Its a single site.

Thanks for your input.