Effective today, LogMeIn is removing their free remote control software offerings so they can focus on their premium remote access products.
LogMeIn Free has been available for the past 10 years and I have been using it for almost that entire time. Like most others, I am wondering about the lack of notice before the news started breaking across other channels.
A post to the LogMeIn blog today revealed the coming changes to LogMeIn Free. The information is supplemented by an FAQ. An email is supposed to be sent out but I haven’t received one nor have others with LogMeIn Free accounts.
1. Q: Why are you making this change?
A: In order to address the evolving needs of our customers, we will be unifying our portfolio of free and premium remote access products into a paid-only offering. We believe this offering to be the best premium desktop, cloud and mobile access experience available in the market today.
Starting today, you can no longer add free computers to your LogMeIn account. Existing LogMeIn Free computers will have 7 days after they log into their account. Other circumstances may earn discounts or continued use of the free line.
The change seems to come from revenue generation reasons based off of the LogMeIn Investor blog.
Currently, consensus revenue estimates for LogMeIn in 2014 are $190.3 million. While it’s too early to project the precise impact of this initiative, we anticipate our 2014 revenue will be consistent with these estimates without any revenue contribution from this business model shift. However, management believes there may be some incremental revenue contribution as a result of this program, depending on the number of users that convert to our premium offering.
This change might affect a person who has LogMeIn Free installed on their parents’ computer miles away or their personal computer. Unfortunately, legitimate people that used LogMeIn Free for personal use may have lost that offer to abuse from commercial entities installing the service on all of the computers in their organization.
If you would like to continue using LogMeIn, you can switch to the paid Pro line: 2 computers for $99/year, 5 computers for $249/year, 10 computers for $449/year. The LogMeIn Central pricing is also seeing an increase with this change.
More like, LogMeOut.
Alternatives to LogMeIn
If you would rather move away from LogMeIn or stick with a free product, you might check out these alternatives for remote access.
- Remote Desktop
- VNC – UltraVNC (UltraVNC Single Click), RealVNC, TightVNC
- TeamViewer
- Bomgar
- ScreenConnect
- GoToAssist
- Join.me (owned by LogMeIn, so it might go away at some point too)
- Chrome Remote Desktop
- AMMYY Admin