Is it possible to not go all-in?
I realize this is perhaps the wrong crowd to ask this of, but here I am:
I had an incident recently where a home appliance that shouldn't have to be connected to the wifi got compromised and used 1.5+TB of my home bandwidth over a weekend; my ISP locked me down for the remainder of June and we couldn't use our home internet and we got $50 in overage charges to boot. Thanks to some sleuthing on our old wifi router I was able to figure out what device it was (the dishwasher) and resolved the issue. But this was a reactive solution and I'd like to be more pro-active in the future, so I started looking at more advanced routers and pretty much everyone recommends Ubiquiti's stuff as "so you need a pro-grade router"
I'm eying the Dream Router 7 and it seems like it fits all my needs.
My concern is, everyone I know with Ubiquiti stuff has multiple thousands of dollars of their equipment. No one has "just the router and a WAP", it's "I rewired my entire house and now I've got a rack and switches in each room and multiple WAP extensions and a doorbell and a bunch of cameras and motion-sensitive lights too!" and I don't want, and I will not be able to sell my partner on, any of that.
We're decidedly behind the times on a lot of things, having just got a used 1080p Plasma TV a few years ago and a first-gen Nintendo Switch last year. *I* have three computers and a NAS, but I develop multi-platform desktop software; everything else on our network is either a phone, tablet, or something my partner wanted: a sonos speaker, a printer, robot litter box, robot vacuum, and unfortunately the dishwasher, which requires the app and an internet connection to do a rinse-only cycle.
So I guess in summary, my question is: Can I get the DR7 with a peace of mind that it'll just *work* as a replacement for my existing 7-year old WIFI router? Or is it going to begat other purchases?