For several years I ran a computer consulting business, mostly helping older people with a few small businesses thrown in for flavor.
When I moved my residence to another state, there were several of my clients who didn’t want to look for a new computer guy, and my dad also was going to be much farther away, so I looked for remote access software.
I ended up picking AnyDesk. It was seamless, I could specify a secure remote access password to protect my clients’ computers, and it worked well. It was not cheap, but I used it for a tax deduction, and it was nice to be able to pull up an “address book” of computers and connect to the one I needed, when I needed it.
A couple of years ago, I shut down my business. Taxes were too much of a hassle, so I just shut down. However, I have one business client who is near retirement, and whose computer situation is rather complex. Rather than leaving him on his own to find another computer guy (since he’s also a friend) I told him I’d continue to support him, but I wouldn’t charge him. At the time, my dad was still alive, and still in that old state, so I used AnyDesk to connect to him, too. I also had another retiree living in that other place who desperately needed my help from time to time, and whom I had stopped charging some time past since he would let his computer situation get really bad for fear of the bill.
At the same time, I didn’t see a way to keep paying for AnyDesk. I’ve mentioned that it was expensive, and I no longer had a way to justify it by expensing it. (To clarify, I still pay for hosting and domain services for my old business, my client’s business, a non-profit, and my daughter, and all of that is less than an annual license for AnyDesk.) Well, I downgraded to the free license (only for non-commercial use) and everything was fine until recently.
My client/friend in the other state called me up with a computer problem. I fired up the AnyDesk connection and … had to wait for 60 seconds while they blocked my viewport with an ad for the commercial license. I’m already volunteering my time to help this guy, but now AnyDesk is going to cost me more time?
It gets worse. After working on his machine fairly briefly, another ad popped up. Because it’s inside the remote client, there’s no way to move it out of the way.
I don’t know what the next step will be. I’m considering RustDesk, since that’s free, open-source, can be locally hosted, and is robust enough that a large non-profit I have connections to is considering moving to RustDesk from Bomgar. The benefit to locally hosting is, of course, that the terms can be frozen. Even if RustDesk goes to a paid model, I can keep running the local install at the working version until OS compatibility issues force me to re-evaluate.