I have seen two articles about some of our larger competitors in the past week. One about the TeamViewer hack and one about LogMeIn. The first was an article about how users were upset with LogMeIn price bumps. I have seen articles and users continually upset about that since they first started charging for LogMeIn back in January of 2014. In fact I was one of the users that was upset about the lack of a good and affordable alternative to LogMeIn back then, and that was one of the catalysts that drove the creation of RemoteToPC. That and the question that no one would answer, was Teamviewer now charging for upgrades?
This latest article that I read, it was not so much about how LogMeIn had continually bumped up prices, but how users were surprised by the charging of their credit cards without warning. When they first started raising prices, they often offered users a discount on the new pricing, but now it seems that they just charge them the new higher price with no warning at all. One user complained that because he was using it for 700 devices, his pricing went from $299 per year to $14,999 per year. That drove him away from LogMeIn to TeamViewer. His price with RemoteToPC would be $1999 per year, and he could add up to 1000 computers at that price level.
For all of the disgruntled LogMeIn users, it’s not as if TeamViewer users are happy. Teamviewer pricing is based on a large upfront cost that many might feel was a bad investment because according to articles and lot’s of blog chatter, TeamVeiwer was recently hacked. Because of this allegedly massive TeamViewer hack, (A point finally conceded by Teamviewer here: Admission of Hack) many companies that had been using TeamViewer are scrambling to find another more secure product among Teamviewer competitors. I was contacted by one IT company in Spain that was looking to leave TeamViewer for that very reason, and articles are all over the internet, and sites like Reddit. (see: Teamviewer alternative Reddit) Others have also commented on the fact that TeamViewer has a nasty habit of unexpectedly requiring mandatory upgrades of customers who have already bought the product, raising the question how much does Teamviewer really cost them over time? Teamviewer should allow users to turn off automated updates of installed client host software, but I would suspect that this regular windfall of new cash for upgrades is built into thier pricing model.
Ultimately, I really don’t consider TeamViewer an apples to apples comparison to what we offer with RemoteToPC, because TeamViewer does not offer any sort of system monitoring or alerts the way we do. I would categorise TeamViewer as more of a generic remote access application. Although we have some customers that use RemoteToPC to just access their work PCs from home, RemoteToPC was designed specifically for IT people, and so that’s why every install also includes system health monitoring. We could have designed a more generic product, but as our tag line says, RemoteToPC is designed by IT people for IT people. So what that means is that from our perspective any new RemoteToPC features will always have the IT person in mind.
