I live in Chicago and use T-Mobile prepaid. Bought my Xperia X from B&H Photo and Video and bought my Sailfish license using an American credit card and a PIA VPN to Finland.

I used Opera and a Travelex prepaid card.

Glad to see the continued North American presence here. I wonder if Jolla Ltd knows we are alive and spending money. Presumably they do, but presumably we are too small potatoes for them to care one way or another.

Sailfish is a Niche product, why further limit the user base?

railroadmaster - I also live in the greater Chicagoland area. I am nowhere near the skill level of the people who post on here. I read the instructions people and Jolla posted for getting the Xperia X flashed and installed. They were really thorough and worked flawlessly. I also purchased our Xperia X phones from B&H Photo, per deprecated's recommendation.

I saw the Opera+VPN recommended and had to download Opera explicitly for that functionality. I used my U.S.-based Chase debit card and was able to purchase the software licenses from Jolla and install five phones now.

I'm basically saying - the community is so awesome that if I can get this done, I'm sure you'll be able to do it.

Despite various issues with Sailfish, I really enjoy using it every day. I believe it is worth the effort and you may even feel a sense of accomplishment doing something that most probably none of your friends, family or acquaintances would ever dream of doing. And if you run into problems, there is a great community to assist, even if Jolla doesn't officially support the devices here.

I also use T-Mobile. There is a message thread about the settings you may have to manually put in to get proper phone functionality on the U.S. T-Mobile network. Again, easy peasy, but it is something to be aware of.

Yes! How do those users dare to spend money
They should be punished! No more updates! Err..

My suspicion is that it's to do with software patents in the US.

Have to agree with mrsellout. US pattent landsape is terribly toxic. Besides I suspect that some FCA or other regulations may be too rigid/complicated for Jolla to work whith at current level of manpower. They didn´t manage it for J1 once where they had way more financial power and larger staff.

I thought that was to do with the hardware certification and the difficulties of entering the market dominated by carriers. To be honest, I was also baffled by the seemingly arbitrary limitation on Sailfish X licensing. But whatever it is, there seem to be ways around it, judging by the above posts.

my suspcion is that it's to do with certain three-letter-agencies

BTW, looking at the global statistics from Open Repos it looks like the Sailfish OS community in US is pretty big, if not one the biggest one:
https://openrepos.net/statistics/global