Short Notice: LogMeIn To Discontinue Free Access

An anonymous reader writes "The remote desktop service LogMeIn sent an email to its users today notifying them that 'LogMeIn Free' will be discontinued — as of today. This is a major shock with minimal warning to the millions of users who have come to rely on their service, made all the more surprising by the fact that 'consensus revenue estimates for LogMeIn in 2014 are $190.3 million,' suggesting that their system of providing both free and paid accounts for what is ultimately a straightforward service that could be duplicated for well under $1 million was already doing quite well." Asks reader k280: "What alternative tools are available for free, and how do they compare to LogMeIn?"

Comments

Uh?

[jawtheshark]

Personally, I just set up two DNS servers, and my own dyndns service (inspired on freedns.afraid.org) and I make sure the people I support have the necessary port forwards for ssh using keys. From there on, it's just an ssh tunnel away for RDP or VNC.

Now, for a nice all-in-one-package, where you don't need to do anything yourself and don't need to prepare the target PC's, I'd say TeamViewer works perfectly fine.

Re:Uh?

[jawtheshark]

If you have a server ssh-accessible, you don't need any of that.

ssh -L 3389:wifes-computer:3389 myserver.no-ip.com

Now you have a tunnel going from localhost:3389 to the wifes-computer, going over myserver.no-ip.com. This means you point your RDP client to localhost and you magically connect.

Clients like Reminna can do this all from the interface.

Nothing is exposed, except for the server and only the ssh daemon. Everything is nicely encrypted. My example was for RDP, but you can do VNC too by using 5900 instead.

Chrome Remote Desktop

[essbase_nerd]

Chrome Remote Desktop doesn't have all the bells and whistles that LogMeIn has, but it's simple and works well.

Re:Chrome Remote Desktop

[The MAZZTer]

Only thing it's missing, for me, is an Android client app, and that is coming. Until then TeamViewer works pretty good.

Re:Chrome Remote Desktop

[mrbene]

Important note - Chrome Remote Desktop works by default as a screen scraper, so that anyone physically near the computer you've remotely logged in to can see what you're doing on the monitor. However, there's a simple registry key that you can add to enable "curtain" mode, which spins up an instance of Remote Desktop and connects to that, instead.

More information here.

Re:Chrome Remote Desktop

[zugmeister]

I received that happy email myself this morning and am considerably less than pleased. However, at the risk of not conforming to a potential lynch mob mentality, it would appear they're giving me 6 months of pro service on my existing account before they turn it off. This is plenty of time to make a change.

That they would make a major change like that which invalidates a previously purchased product, in my case an excellent $130 program called Ignition, with no recourse to continue other than paying them more money, tells me all I need to know about how LMI views their subscribers.

Baaaa!

alternatives

[fluffythdestroy]

Although join.me is by logmein this one seems to be free so try to use join.me instead of a connection pc 2 pc is what your looking for. works great for troubleshooting a complete noob that messed is pc up and calls you at midnight to fix his pc.

Theres also teamviewer that works in a similar way like join.me and logmein. You can remotely log in a pc and work on it. Skype also has a share screen function so you might look at that as well

Re:alternatives

[kcbnac]

You're describing UltraVNC Single Click: http://www.uvnc.com/products/u...

Re:Teamviewer

[v1]

TeamViewer recently pushed an "update" that imposes a fairly short time limit on the free connections. This was not mentioned to the users prior to running the update. It also "upgraded your account" online so you can no longer run the older unlimited version of teamviewer.

That, combined with the obsession about not wanting you to install your licensed copy on more than one support computer (despite being totally online and trivially blocked from simultaneous instances) lead me to drop my support for them as well. We even bought a license, but having to bump someone from the machine it's registered on just to remote into someone else here is a hassle. Just another example of making users "regret upgrading". That's a horrible business model.

There really isn't any good free 3rd party alternative out there that I've seen. I can map ports and even have set up remote check-ins to manage changing IP addresses, but being able to automatically traverse routers (uPNP) I haven't managed to replicate yet. The easiest thing for me at this point, since I run mac, is to simply use FaceTime's screen sharing, which provides the auto check-in for dynamic IPs and also does a good job of getting in through routers. The last os upgrade was free even, which makes it a bit cheaper than LogMeIn or TeamViewer ;)

I ditched LogMeIn a couple of years ago

[ebbe11]

And have been using NeoRouter Free ever since.

Re:Similar functionality to what?

[sandytaru]

It allows remote login to desktop computers that are online from any other desktop computer. The free version was meant for consumers; the paid version is used by a lot of IT and tech support companies who support remote users because it's a heck of a lot easier than driving over there, and doesn't need to be on the same domain like RDP.

Re:This sucks

[gigaherz]

Firewall is not the problem, NAT is.

Re:Teamviewer

[v1]

that DOES NOT WORK. After you launch the latest version, it connects online and "upgrades" your account. Once upgraded, if you try to launch an older version of teamviewer and sign in with your account, "you can no longer use this version of teamviewer, please install the latest update".

BS like that, that's why I left. "OK then, so if you're so into using forced online verification, why can't you let me install it on all the machines here so long as I'm only USING it on one at a time?" They refused to answer that. "Money" of course was the correct answer. I can see pulling a stunt like that for the free users, but we paid for a license and they still gave us the shaft. Bad move to do that to a paying customer.

For now I think you're "safe" as long as you keep the old app, and never login (anywhere) with version 9 and allow it to "upgrade" your account. They don't appear to have been planning to do this in 8, so it doesn't force you to upgrade. I'm sure that's been "fixed" in the latest version.

MY account on the other hand, is ruined, sorry to say. I don't think you can make an earlier version account with 8 anymore either. (I should test that)

Re:Well ...

[NibbleG]

Honestly, I didn't mean Jew the shark... that was an honest typo...