I have a lot of customers who are looking to collect social media, email, or some other info in exchange for their 'free wifi' in restaurants mostly (some deli or small shops too). I am fine with setting up captive portals on the technical / hardware / controller side of the house but these are small business owners who also are asking me about doing the captive portal side for them.
I found Facebook stopped accepting vendors / partners on their wifi services and it seemed limited to only Facebook and lets face it, not everyone has FB. So I've gotten some pricing from companies such as socialwifi.com for example and I'm shocked at the pricing... for basically collecting info into a database and giving it to each site's owner for marketing, they are charging at least $49/mo/site. If I have to spin up an AWS cloud sever for this purpose, that's fine with me... I too would charge but build it into my hardware support costs and be more reasonable but really I don't know if I want to manage yet another cloud service.
Does anyone know any open source options for this or companies who could allow me to resell the services (i.e. sign up for a 10 site account and split it with 10 of my single site customers)?
I know this is outside the super technical stuff I come here to keep an eye on regularly but it's related to networking so I'm hoping this is allowed. Thanks in advance!
PS: Hardware is currently in OpenMesh but I'm moving these customers to beta.altiwi.com which runs openWRT with cloud controller or I may go to another open source controller... I am sure I can make the hardware work for captive portal needs with whatever vendors or opensource software can collect the data and keep it organized to run reports.
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