We originally reached out to 9Elements last year along with several other coreboot consultants, but all of their prices were so outrageous ($50k-$100K per board) that we decided to try porting our laptops ourselves. After hitting a sticking point, we reluctantly contacted them again for help debugging our code.

From the start, our interactions with Christian Walter were awful. We repeatedly stressed how important and time-sensitive this project was, but he seemed completely indifferent. In fact, he made a snide remark about us coming back after trying to do it ourselves.

We never received a quote for the actual porting, but they said the evaluation cost is typically 10% of the total cost, which would mean the porting would have cost around $33,000 for Dasharo-branded coreboot, and $66,000 for unbranded coreboot. Even their highly discounted Dasharo-branded porting comes out to around $250 to $330 an hour, and that’s if they started from scratch. We had 80%+ of the job already complete. We just needed to debug our code.

Sometimes people take their vehicle to mechanics and don’t like the quotes for the repair costs. Some of those people then choose to try to do the work at home. Sometimes one of those people will then reluctantly take the car back to the mechanic after they screw up the work.

And then they balk, because they discover that (A) the mechanic will outright refuse to work on the vehicle due to it being in a dismantled state, or (B) the mechanic will give an even higher quote since they now have to diagnose and clean up the mistakes too.