If you are going to buy teamviewer, think twice! I will explain you how they owned me and maybe save yourself a disappointment.
They allure you with a free for personal use, almost full featured version, which works indeed very well: set up is easy, remote connections are quick, sessions are stable and the video stream is fast with any decent internet connection.
They propose you a pay-once license starting from € 500 (minus 1€) and up to € 2.000 (minus 1€), saying that they will grant you at last 10 years of operativity.
I’ve been happy with the purchase of a teamviewer 7 business license for some time. Whenever I needed to give remote support to a customer of mine, I asked him to download teamviewer from its official site, or, for the sake of simplicity and branding, the customized quick support version from my own site.
If the customer had teamviewer already installed on its PC, then all was ready to establish a connection and give him support: I had to ask just for his ID and password.
Problems came a few months later, when teamviewer 8 update was out. All my customers were invited by the teamviewer application to update their software, which they did. In order to be able to connect to my customer’s PC having the latest teamviewer installed, I was required to do the update of my teamviewer license, but I was asked 159 extra bucks!
I did such an unpleasant discovery when I was in an emergency and needing to connect to a PC running the just updated teamviewer. Since I was in an emergency, and since the update offered a couple of potentially useful new features, I decided to buy the update, but…
…some months later, another update (version 9) was out! Of course I was asked 159 euros again. Many customers having done the update (for free), but I needed to pay. This time the new version had no interesting new features to me, so I really had no reason to spend money on it and felt “forced” to do the update in order to have a software working with all my customers.
Briefly, this is how the trap works:
– customers generally have the latest version of the teamviewer software installed on their PCs, because they are reminded to do the update for free if they have an old teamviewer version or because they went on the teamviewer.com site and downloaded it from the home page.
– customers are continuosly reminded to update their teamviewer software, so they normally do it at some point.
– if you must give support and you have bought an old license (version 8 in my case), you can’t connect with customers who have the latest version (currently version 9).
– another tricky thing: multiple version instances of teamviewer are not allowed to run on a PC. So I have to ask the customer to shut down teamviewer 9 and run teamviewer 8. Usually I have to give him instructions over the phone as they need to swicth teamviewer 9 completely off (not just minimize it), download and run the old version, which could be a long hustle. OK, maybe I could make a script for that or something, but the whole point is:
teamviewer pushes me to do the update and ask me for money every time
There are other people complaining about the same problem: http://www.abluestar.com/blog/why-i-hate-teamviewer/
If I had known about the teamviewer “trap”, probably I would have chosen one of their competitors solutions, which come with yearly subscription based plans. I’m pretty sure that in the end they are cheaper than teamviewer (even if teamviewer site might state the opposite).
Because I’m sick and tired of unfair business practices, I won’t buy another product from Teamviewer.
At the moment, I’m evaluating join.me and LogMeIn which look very promising.