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I opened my laptop this morning and came across this news .

TL;DR LogMeIn pulls the plug on its free version.

Thousands of users now have to upgrade to a paid account in order to access the service. Furthermore, they only have the next 7 days to do it!!!

I understand the freemium model might not always be the perfect solution. However, I don’t understand why LogMeIn didn’t give more time to their users to upgrade or find a new solution. I mean 7 days to set up a solution, get budget approval, testing, etc. isn’t very much. Why so fast? What was so urgent? I think LogMeIn is a great tool, but by giving such a short-term notice they come across to their users as a greedy company instead of an actual IT partner…in my opinion.

And what about LogMeIn for personal use? You know when you need to login in one of your relatives’ laptop for some bug fixing, nobody is going to pay for that.

Anyway, I might not have all have the details but I think there’s a big marketing challenge coming up here.

What do you think fellow marketers? Or someone from LogMeIn? That would be interesting…kind of an AMA thing on Spiceworks!

@GoTo

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Hmm… That was probably a tough decision to make. It’s hard to judge such decisions without some inner knowledge.

Of course, I can’t help but recommend our Remote Utilities here. It’s free for personal use, and not-so-expensive for business use (lifetime license, no recurring payments). But I should also add that personally I respect LogMeIn very much despite all their moves. :slight_smile: They are that sort of competitors that always make you grow. :slight_smile:

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Definitely bad form on the behalf of the LogMeIn folks. I wonder if Join.me is next?

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This is a bummer. LogMeIn is super user friendly/easy to set up and I don’t actually need to use remote desktop software often enough to pay for it.

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So…why hasn’t anyone from LogMeIN said anything about this in the community? I’m kind of shocked.

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There are some incredibly negative posts out there on this, that aren’t being managed well…the shutters are up.

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Feels like there is more to this story. Like Maxime and Kurt, I would love to learn more.

For my take, seven days is really not enough notice. I would think 30 days would be the minimum to offer to help maintain the good will and customer loyalty. Personally, I would feel forced into making a snap decision and the company who pushed me that way would not fare well (disclosure - not a user).

I’ve seen four separate threads about this topic already. I believe they do have a marketing challenge on their hands.

Maxime, thanks for starting a spicy AMA-type discussion.

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There has to be, right? You don’t make snap decisions on your business model.

Yeah…that’s the kicker I think…if they made this for genuinely good business reasons, they could have treated their customers with a little more respect than 7 days to pay up or clear out.

Maybe someone forgot that people using your free services are still customers…even if they aren’t contributing directly to your bottom line…

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Exactly.

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Comment over on The Register resonates with a lot of people I think.

“Now I know this could come across as ‘freetard whinges as profit-making entity takes away his free toys’ - I prefer to think of it as ‘hopelessly addicted cracktard’s free supply dries up as dealer hits him for national debt of a small Eastern European republic to pay for next fix’. Nice one, LogMeIn. You could have just asked nicely for a reasonable amount of money for a domestic user.”

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I kind of feel like this post is throwing some of our fellow Green Guys into a difficult hole to respond to based off the tone. While we may not understand or agree with the decision, I am sure it was not made lightly and has a solid reason behind it. Just like any other business, LogMeIn is in it to make money and show profits, and if a free product is being abused and hurts the bottom line, I can understand its removal.

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100% agree with that.

But if that is the case, why not just say so?

It could hardly be regarded as an industrial secret that profit making businesses are in it to make money…and I get the impression that if they had just come out with a straight answer, there would be a whole lot less hate.

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I don’t think people mean it that way. I’ve seen Ben out and about in the community posting replies. I feel terribly for him and am fairly positive that he will not be able to participate in this discussion.

I think this is a good learning opportunity in general because one day it is possible that we will have to deliver unpopular news to our customers (maybe some of us already have). It could be a free service going away, the end of a program or product, change in warranty, etc. How do you communicate change? How do you guide customers through the transition? There are a lot of examples of companies who have made a mistake or turned a bad situation into a more positive experience in the end. The question is how to take the situation at hand and improve or learn from it.

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Agreed.

We had this with the death of our consumer product line, Bento.

With the launch of OSX Mavericks, it would have required a full redevelopment, and the business decision was made to not do so.

We offered Bento customers, FileMaker at 50% off…and suffered the same anger and disappointment…horrible thing to be on the receiving end of.

I’d say the level of negative feeling/disappointment is a good measure of how many people were using the free version of LogMeIn and loved doing so…but aren’t in a position to invest in the paid version.

When all the dust has settled, and people have taken a look at what’s being offered, what they need and what it costs, things will calm down…but communication is key here and I still think that any subscription service that doesn’t give a good amount of notice of a change of ToS is doing it’s customers a huge disservice.

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Thank you everyone for the feedback - we have heard from customers all over the board this week.

We are here to provide answers and support - please do not hesitate to reach out should you feel the need to.

FAQ: http://bit.ly/1eP1l29

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Hi Ben,

I’m sorry your day has probably been less-than-ideal.

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This post was never intended to throw a fellow Green Guy into a difficult situation. I decided to post it because I think we can all learn and become better marketers and decision makers if we take some time to discuss about it and exchange our opinions.

I think we can all come across a similar situation at some point in the future and this might be a great opportunity to learn how to handle it.

I think LogMeIn has a great product and we can all agree that a company have to make profit to survive. We know it and the users know it. The decision must not have been an easy one and I’m sure LMI knew that it was going to be an unpopular choice. Like I mentioned in the post, I think there’s a great marketing challenge coming up and like Toni said, there are many companies that turned an unpopular decision into a great opportunity and I’m pretty sure LMI is one of them.

We don’t have all the information regarding the decision so it’s hard for us as outsiders to tell if whether or not it is a good one. However, we can look in the future and see how the situation turns out and learn from it.

Thanks Ben for reaching out. I’m sure you had a though week. I’ve seen many of your posts in the different discussion groups and it’s great to see a fellow marketer stepping up to the plate in those kind of situations.

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For another example of a free service coming to an end, ironically, I just happened to come across this post today on LinkedIn reminding people they only had a few days left (original post Jan. 2nd):

Blog - Abrigo (Same disclosure - not a user of this service)

Situations like this are never easy, but worth thinking about. It is similar to the situations our tech support departments face every day: people who contact support are frustrated and tech support has the opportunity to help and deepen the relationship.

I guess we’ll have to stay tuned and see what happens. Good luck, Ben!

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I’m a founder of a startup in Austin (not far from Spiceworks) who offers a cloud based network management tool and would love to hear some community feedback on our solution as a viable alternative to LogMeIn free. I’ve spoken to some of our users and they’re telling us this is their solution to the LogMeIn change - but we want to hear from all of you.

ihiji offers basic cloud-based remote desktop access at a very attractive price point - less than LogMeIn for more than 2 computers at a site. The ConnectNinja feature allows secure tunnels to any TCP port on a remote network - meaning you can easily tunnel to Remote Desktop or VNC on a local workstation or server through our web portal. You’ll also get the added benefits of WAN performance monitoring, LAN performance logging, network inventory and remote monitoring capabilities. The product evolved recently to replace Cisco’s OnPlus solution when they discontinued the product so it is very powerful outside of just remote access.

We’re actually holding a webinar next week to discuss the OnPlus sunset as well as using ihiji as a replacement to LogMeIn.

You can register here https://hk128.infusionsoft.com/app/page/ihiji-cloud-based-remote-network-managment-webinar-2014-jan.

Thoughts?

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Hi Michael,

Great to hear alternatives being offered, and Spiceworks sure is a good place to talk to IT Pros. The Tech Marketing area is maybe not the best place to pose such a question…not if you want to talk to customers rather than other marketers anyway! :wink:

If you want the Spiceheads to engage, it would be great to see some information about your company and your products up on your profile…a sales pitch in a post tends not to go down all that well.

A further word of advice, swooping in with one post (and only one post), and offering your services as a competitor to an established vendor in this situation, may not enamor you to the Spiceheads.

Thanks

Chris

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