Building a Home Router with a Raspberry Pi 5 and OpenWrt
Series: How I Used Claude Code to Slash My Cloud Bill by 63% Part 1: The $198/Month Wake-Up Call Part 2: Migrating 7 Static Sites to Cloudflare Pages Part 3: Killing the Load Balancer with Cloudflare Tunnel Part 4: Building a Home Router with a Raspberry Pi 5 (you are here) Part 5: Connecting Everything with Tailscale Part 6: The Final Architecture - $74/mo and Zero Regrets The Pi on the Desk I had a Raspberry Pi 5 (8GB) sitting on my desk running Debian trixie. It was serving as an occasional dev box, but mostly collecting dust. Meanwhile, I was paying Comcast for a gateway that doubled as a mediocre WiFi router. The gateway WiFi was fine for my wife’s devices, but I started thinking: what if I ran my own router? ...