Are you aware of any trustworthy, free VyOS builds? I'd be interested in trying it out at home, but I'm not interested in paying $6k/year or using an unstable nightly. I tried building it myself once but didn't have time to get it working locally.
Yeah. $6k/year is just waaaay too much to get into it.
You'd be amazed at how stable the 1.3 builds are.
Do you mean the 1.4 rolling builds? The 1.3 ones require a support contract.
You can get monthly snapshots free of charge which receive some testing compared to rolling builds. They currently have 1.3 RC builds https://vyos.net/get/snapshots/