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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?"
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.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
Chrome Remote Desktop doesn't have all the bells and whistles that LogMeIn has, but it's simple and works well.
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
PC Gaming enthousiast that gives comments, opinions and reviews on Games. I'm just having fun with games while doing let
Logmein loses 99% of their user base. :)
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.
Why is it surprising that a company might want to do better than "quite well" when it sees the opportunity?
Also:
what is ultimately a straightforward service that could be duplicated for well under $1 million
Go on then. Or was that number just pulled out of someone's behind?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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 work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Used it to control my HTPC from my iPad. I think their pricing is just a wee bit too high, though. If it were, say, $25 a year (rather than $50), I'd probably say that it was worth it to avoid having to find an alternative. As it is, I'll find something else.
And have been using NeoRouter Free ever since.
My opinion? See above.
Perhaps this is just reinforcing my "you're an IT dinosaur, old man!" but for the benefit of us ignoramuses, might it be possible for the submitter or, god forbid, the editors to say what "log me in" actually does?
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
And I'm sure that Logmein will be crying that you left.
I use several free services and never pay for them. However, I also recommend them to clients, and often they do pay for them. I am responsible for quite a few paid no-ip subscriptions, and I personally never pay. I was responsible for a few paid dyn dns subscriptions back in the day when they were free. Now I use and recommend no-ip. See how that works?
There is no automatic method of cancelling your account. You have to call the tech support line at https://secure.logmein.com/con... for your locale. All you can do on the site is delete the computers on your account. As of this post, I cannot get through to the US & Canada line, just getting a busy signal. Apparently I'm not the only one following this route. As has been mentioned in other posts there are plenty of free options out there capable of the same features that a free LogMeIn account was capable of doing.
It's so typical. Someone offers a service/product for free. People use it and like it. They keep using it. Then the service/product gets changed/removed/etc and everyone yells at the owner about how they feel shafted instead of *thanking* the owner for providing such a useful service for free for so long.
Everyone feels entitled to get whatever they want for free.
No one is entitled to anything above and beyond what the contract says - no contract, no entitlement.
*However*, in just the same way as a customer might be peeved when a supplier sticks rigidly to the contract terms instead of offering some good-will flexibility, a customer of a free service is going to be a bit peeved by this kind of no-notice change to the service... And peeved customers aren't the kind of people to continue to be customers, which is important where you're withdrawing the free service in the hope that many of your "free" customers will move to the paid service - if you pissed them off then they probably won't.
I'll give you a real world example: I have a bunch of servers in datacentres run by Host-It. They are over-priced, but we've been happy with their customer service so haven't switched to a cheaper datacentre. We pay for 12 months of hosting up-front, and about a month after we paid for one of our servers, the server failed and we decided to retire it. Coincidentally, the contract was up for renewal for another of our servers at the same time, so we asked them to transfer the remaining 11 months on the contract for the failed server over to that server. Seemed pretty fair enough to us. They flatly refused - sure, the contract doesn't say they have to do that, but it would seem to be a reasonable thing to do from a good-will perspective. So we had to pay for 11 months of hosting for a server that died (so they haven't actually been hosting it) because they refused to be reasonable and instead stuck rigidly to the contract terms. Now I'm not saying they were in the wrong - far from it, legally speaking they were dead in the right, but their lack of good will has ensured all future servers we commission will be hosted elsewhere.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
Honestly, I didn't mean Jew the shark... that was an honest typo...
well. i know i should not. but it just seems to repeat again and again, and this seems so relevant...
http://xkcd.com/1150/
Rich