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Comment by jmuguy | Hacker News Reader

My old company used Logmein professionally to remotely manage 100s of computers for many years before switching to ConnectWise.

They had a great product for a long time but some of the worse licensing decisions I've ever seen. It went from being completely free to several thousand dollars overnight without any additional features, support, etc being offered. And meanwhile development was stagnant with only weird changes to the UI and punitive changes to free users being rolled out.

We would have been more than willing to pay for licensing. Even in the end it was the one product we found that could do some really cool stuff remotely (like recover a frozen Windows system and reboot it into safe mode). But they just handled the business side of things like complete idiots.

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A customer of mine had LogMeIn Pro just to access a single pc from a couple of phones every now and then. One day it suddenly stopped working. As it turned out, in the three years they had been using it, the price had hiked from about 100 EUR to over 350 EUR. Having no idea who charged them that much and what for, they reversed the credit card transaction. Since then, they've moved on to RealVNC. It's 1/10th of the price and works just as well if not better. Don't let the name discourage you; the product has very little to do with the old and inefficient VNC protocol anymore. I was hesitant to try it, but it's been a very positive experience.

> Don't let the name discourage you; the product has very little to do with the old and inefficient VNC protocol anymore.

But RealVNC's products are all built on that same VNC protocol...? At least I see many things referencing it and nothing indicating that they don't use it.

If it's still based on VNC, for sure it's much more efficient (and user-friendlier packaged) than any of the open source competition I've experienced over the years. So much that I think that still using the name VNC does them more harm than good.

I think perhaps you're unfamiliar with the open source competition. Most of the open source VNC servers support something like H.264 which while a little dated, is still quite efficient, especially for the low-latency streaming needed for remote desktop applications.

The only novel-looking thing I see on RealVNC's website is adaptive bitrate, which I don't think I've seen in the open source servers.

You know, I might be. In that case, please enlighten me with a counterexample. Anyway, the point isn't to pick on the competition. I'm merely saying that RealVNC is a fine, fairly priced product with a rather bad name. Many people, myself included, have a dismissive initial reaction based on memories of old-fashioned (slow, hard to set up over the internet) VNC. At least with RealVNC, it's nothing like that anymore, whereas with TightVNC for one, it still pretty much is. I use the latter as well, but only for light usage on local networks—acceptable and better than it once used to be, yet a completely different experience.

That's the question I have; can you access the remote login screen with realvnc? My understanding was you couldn't do that with vnc on windows, have to use rdp.

No need to pay for RealVNC, when TightVNC is FLOSS. Can confirm the login screen is accesible in global service mode.

I'd recommend that your customer checks out [Chrome Remote Desktop](https://remotedesktop.google.com/). It's completely free, simple to set up, and seems to perform way better than VNC. Plus no need to open firewall ports or worry about encryption and security – that's all handled for you.

Just for the record, you don't need to worry about any of that with RealVNC either, and the protocol seems way more efficient than any other VNC I've used. Frankly, I think the product should be renamed to get rid of this bad association. It's way more similar to LogMeIn Pro than TightVNC, for example.

I'd really like to use this but without a Google account. Hopefully this will be possible one day.

What's still in it for Google then?

I think that’s the point.

It’s a terrible user experience for anything other than clicking on things. Can’t use a lot of keyboard shortcuts because they trigger browser behaviours. An issue that didn’t exist when they had a chrome app. The website always breaks in some form. Is laggy. If you’re using windows and the lock screen happens and you come back. Copy/paste stops working.

The chrome app was awesome. The website sucks.

If it's free, you are the product. It's by Google for crying out loud.

I agree. I have around 500 computers under management, finally left them for Teamviewer after LMI's price tripled and their features halved (or worse). I ran it mostly from Linux, which they seemed to be withdrawing support for.

I wish Teamviewer has a small business pricing model. I love their product. However, I only have ~ 70 clients I need to support at a 501c3 school. Their cost are still too high for us.

Hi. I’m a developer on Jump Desktop. If you’re interested, we have a similar product with no computer limits and it’s very reasonably priced ($9/user/month): https://jumpdesktop.com/#teams .

You may be able to get a discounted TeamViewer license through the school via Techsoup.org.

https://www.techsoup.org/teamviewer

$10 to TechSoup gets you 60% off list price for TeamViewer. Your license pays for simultaneous controlling sessions, so our plan that would have cost $200/mo. is $80.

We've had access to TechSoup forever, but we keep forgetting to take advantage of it. We were able to make our money go a lot farther than it would have this year because we started looking through their catalog again.

At the time I loved their product and installed it on parents machines. It was great. I was happy to pay 100 or 200 a year but they wanted way more. Stopped using it and never found an equivalent.

I use copilot when I need to remotely help my parents.

https://www.copilot.com/Pricing

Why not use Chrome Remote Desktop Remotedesktop.google.com which is free for family support? It's much easier than it used to be

For what it's worth, ConnectWise is also owned by private equity (Thoma Bravo). TB seems to be supporting the growth of the company.

> TB seems to be supporting the growth of the company.

PE "support growth" for forcing loans on the company with expectation they'll be paid back, which makes the company operate very differently than a VC-backed growth startup.

My current employer was formerly owned by Thoma Bravo. They "supported growth" on the surface. Under that veneer was really juicing up the company to make us more attractive for their exit - short term decisions that have resulted in a lot of employee burnout and have put us in a bad place under our new ownership.

I hope to not have to work for a PE-owned company in the future, as their goals (to position for their exit, usually 3-5 years after initial purchase) often result in short-term oriented choices that hurt a company's long term potential

So the quarterly goals of public companies are better? Many companies sell to sponsors in order to be able to make long term strategic decisions.

An interesting approach. When I worked at a university and had 100+ machines to handle (back in the WinXP days), we just used udpcast + sysprep to do full disk cloning. We never bothered with individual machines, if anything ever went wrong we just wiped the whole thing and re-cloned it.

Keeping 100+ machines up and running, and caring for individual ones sounds like a whole lot of work. Admittedly we got away with it because those were lab computers used by students, and data persistence did not matter as much (each student had a samba share mounted, which was on a central server and had backups)

I do wonder if full disk cloning + sysprep is still an option with newer versions of windows.

We managed a bunch of small businesses, with sometimes completely different hardware, Windows versions etc. So unfortunately a lot of the larger scale/same local/VPN network IT management solutions wouldn't work for us.

My second job out of high school was at my school district as a PC Tech. I had the highest successful case closures of any technician because they all tried to fix the problem. I just moved the user's local docs to their network share, re-imaged the PC in 5-10 minutes, and copied their local docs back to their local folder. I had ~1000 desktops under my management between my 3 K-9 schools.

Worst job I have ever had though. The amount of politics that go on in a public school is ridiculous.

I thought most k12 were running stuff like Deep Freeze.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Freeze_%28software%29

This was 15 years ago. We had just rolled out Deep Freeze to a handful of labs across our district, but not to the teachers (who had local documents) and the 4 student PCs in the classrooms - yes each class had 5 PCs total.

Our problem with Deep Freeze was getting it to work nice with our locally installed software mixed our custom Novell stack that pushed software dynamically based on logged in users. So we relegated it to computer labs that had no local software.

In my own experience sysprep is not necessary anymore. In fact, we abandoned it because it seemed never to quite work properly anymore which leads me to believe that MS forgot it existed and broke it in some Win 10 update (Thanks guys! [I hate you]).

On modern networks and storage hardware, reimaging a PC from scratch is sometimes faster than rebooting Windows after an update (and always faster than a "feature" update).

Anyone looking into mass image deployment should check out Fog[0], because it is free and works pretty well.

[0] https://fogproject.org

Microsoft definitely didn't forget that sysprep exists, there's a decent sized group in azure that cares just about windows image creation and associated technologies. I think most of sysprep is simply considered "done".

Those were the days. Windows XP really was the sweet spot when it came to reliability and hackability. Sure, Windows 7 was more stable, but also much more opaque. Although I never cloned machines, I did automate the hell out of installs. When it finally worked, it felt like a miracle. Boot from PXE and enjoy the show. I was happy to discover that the most important tool I used back then can still be found on the internet: http://unattended.sourceforge.net.

It does sound like they could have handled the switch better but.....going from completely free to paid...maybe they had mispriced the product and you had benefited from years of their hardwork at no cost? If they ended generating more revenue than they lost then it should be a net win for them. There's the reputational risk to consider by making this price transistion.

Great product, hundreds of computers for professional purposes, and "several thousand dollars" is a sticking point? Why?

Because people never like to pay more for something that was free... Also makes accounting mad

I think the 'overnight' part is key here. I can easily get approval for 20k-100k in necessary software but the approval process can take 1-3 months. If a free service suddenly goes paid without notice, it is much more disruptive than waiting 2mo to start with a new paid service.

Exactly. Big companies move slowly. A small, well-funded company may be able to approve an X-thousand-dollar payment in a matter of days, but a large company just can't react that fast. There are too many layers of process and approvals and vetting and negotiation to wade through.

Sometimes "free" is the maximum the budget will allow. Sometimes it's just about feeling you're been ripped off with a bait & switch.

(Not parent but I have experience from both sides: I regularly purchase five-figure software licenses for my clients, and help clients optimize their own pricing.)

It's about trust and expectations.

If a software company blindsides me with a 1,000% price increase overnight (or ∞%) without advance warning, then how can I trust them to warn me in advance about other major changes in the future? If they don't have the decency to give advance notice about that, can I trust them to give me advance warning before they change major features, or plan to have downtime, or plan to shut down--which becomes a real concern if they're fumbling around with pricing changes.

SSO and access management services are things I want to have zero nagging concerns or doubts about. Anything that shakes my trust in those services is enough to make me consider other options.

Its this, it was a trust thing. Logmein as a company always behaved very strangely. They were very opaque about their roadmap, upcoming pricing changes etc. Where-as other companies have slowly transitioned free users to paid it was extremely sudden with Logmein. We did actually stick with them when it first moved away from being 100% free but then a year later they really ratcheted up the cost, again with no warning.

Windows itself costs $200 or so. LogMeIn isn't worth 5 times as much as the operating system. At that price, it very quickly becomes cheaper to investigate alternatives like just using a Linux machine where remote management is a breeze, and there are tons of high-quality, free tools (with optional paid support contracts that are very inexpensive by comparison.)

Although I agree with your statement of value, it should be noted that Windows does not cost companies $200. Microsoft has a much lower per seat number that most companies pay.

Take a look at the pricing for Jetbrains products. 500€ for the first year only. I'm sure it has some features above "vim with syntax highlighting" but I can't tell which one costs 500.

JetBrains's ReSharper and their Rider IDE are both excellent products and do a ton more than just "vim with syntax highlighting".

ReSharper alone would easily save me that much per year in productivity gains.

I moved over to Ubuntu from Windows, so picking up Rider as my replacement for Visual Studio was well worth it - and at about 1/3 of the price of Visual Studio alone (and having the ReSharper features built in) it was a bargain.

The nice thing about their pricing is that it gets cheaper in the the second year and then again the third year. So from the third year on it's only 389 euro/year for the toolbox bundle that includes all products, so you'll be set for tools tools for any mainstream language.

Yeah, 900€ just for two years is nothing. And this is just for the IntelliJ IDEA, not the whole pack. The standalone Office suite is 650€ for life. Photoshop from Adobe is quite a lot cheaper (some variant goes for $120/yr).

they're infamous on /r/sysadmin for having a relatively normal price, then suddenly going up 3-400% with little notice. It's not easy to lift and shift this quickly so some companies have been forced into getting hosed for a year.

Companies will pay money for software, but they are risk adverse and being inconsistent (e.g. large immediate price increase) will make them switch unless they are currently stuck with your product (e.g. Oracle).

No one likes going into another budget meeting because some vendor didn't give you warning and you need to adjust in the current fiscal year. Your company will be remembered and not in a good way. If you sell software to businesses you really, really need to understand corporate budgeting and the process they go through. Heck, if you sell to Federal (US) entities you better know the significance of October and schedule accordingly.

I always assume that something free might go away or become unfree at any moment. Doesn’t seem too surprising to me.

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