I was quite close to giving Reyee an award for offering great value but ultimately I realized I wasn't convinced it was actually great value. See, what's not covered in this review so far is the part where I tried to get in touch with Reyee to figure out what's going on with the app no longer working properly with the router on its new firmware. The website is quite useless as I mentioned before—it's filled with non-working links and placeholder text—and the two email addresses I came across after some diligent searching weren't helpful either. One bounced back immediately and the other gave me an automatic response (in Chinese) which has not been followed up in the 4+ weeks since. Reyee is effectively offloading its technical documents being hosted on the Amazon product page too, but I can't guarantee that anything good will come out of it either if you need to get any customer support or file a warranty claim. This was the straw that broke this router-shaped camel's back and thus I am unable to recommend the RG-E5 despite it being—all things considered—well priced for the actual features and performance achieved.

Indeed, once you consider that the RG-E5 costs a lot less than just about anything else I've reviewed recently in the networking category, some of those performance shortcomings even feel more than justified. There is also the bonus of having mesh networking capabilities if you purchase two or more of these units—three Reyee RG-E5 routers cost less than a single NETGEAR Orbi RBK950 series router and will have better signal strength in your house. They may still get bested by pure performance but at the same time they also won't try to grab paid subscriptions out of you to get the most out of the product either. I also chuckled when I saw the RG-E5 besting some of the fancier looking routers with internal antennas in terms of signal attenuation and performance on the 2.4 GHz band. If you do feel like taking a chance on this then I can't fault you. Just remember to use the web browser-based admin panel to set up and configure the router as the app, even when not broken, is full of privacy concerns and is a pain to deal with on the best of days.