In April of 2024, a representative from the TeamViewer sales team made contacted to try to convince me to stop using the perpetual license of TeamViewer I purchased and switch to their subscription license. WITH their 60% discount, it would be a whopping $4,800 for 5 years. That 60% discount rate is about 3x more than I purchased the perpetual license, which was supported for 10 years. The sales rep also said that their competitors were offering their remote support products for a higher price. She was doing her job and trying to convince me their product was best.

I went to the TeamViewer forum and found that there were some that were outraged because they purchased a Perpetual license, but TeamViewer was only giving them 10 years of use. I looked into the licensing and indeed, it was written that the perpetual license was only good for 10 years. That’s fairly common in the industry. Microsoft started that way by providing 10 years of support for their Office products. Windows XP was supported for 10 years, as well. But Microsoft wanted to make more money, so they decreased the Office lifetime to 7 years and now it’s at 5 years for their perpetual license. And like TeamViewer, they are desperately trying to migrate everyone over to their subscription license.

I felt it would be good to write some thoughtful feedback in the forum to help others understand that the life of the perpetual license was stipulated in the agreement they signed and how 10 years of support was fair. I also included that there were other products available that were less expensive, even though the sales rep said it wasn’t possible to find them. I related that my own RMM has 2 built in remote support options available and they were free with the RMM I was already purchasing for only $140 per month. So, why pay for more? I wasn’t scathing. I wasn’t rude. However, I did speak honestly and held them accountable.

Fast forward 9 months and I went back to look at my post and it’s gone! There’s not even a mention it was deleted as with other posts. I signed into their forum to investigate further and was greeted with “Permission problem: You are banned.” I found this interesting. This enables TeamViewer sales reps to dish out mistruths about not finding cheaper solutions and keeps their honest customers from holding TeamViewer accountable to the truth. That’s why I’m writing here today.

I encourage others to share their TeamViewer stories, keeping in mind community policies. For reference, the TeamViewer forum article that started this is found here and my post from April of 2024 is no longer there.

9 Spice ups

The TeamViewer forum guidelines/rules state that you cannot post about competing products nor discuss pricing. If your post violated those guidelines, it may have been removed, and your account suspended as a result.

Regardless, if you want truly transparent discussion about something, the manufacturer is likely not the best place to get those impartial opinions.

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Excuse my ignorance, but why would you need TeamViewer as well, perpetual or not if you have remote tools in your RMM?

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They tell you up front, it’s their playground. The same applies to all social media forums, publicly accessible or not. Anything that makes money flow in the opposite direction will not be maintained.

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  1. Calling something “perpetual” and them putting a limit on it, well, seems like there could be a lawsuit there. It is a false representation, yes, I know you need to read the license agreement, but still, pretty slimy.
  2. If you’ve ever left a bad review on a product and found that it was never “posted”/“published” you understand that companies are not always going to let people speak their opinion…that’s just the way it is.

TeamViewer has been known to harass their perpetual license holders into getting subscription based. This was shown in full light a few years ago on youtube with LTT and GN.

We are ditching their subscription as it consistently gives a worse experience. There are many options out there, we went with the one that best served our needs/wants and price model.

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We bought perpetual in 2015 too. Just moved to a 3-year subscription. We too have remote access through a deployment tool and it works great for PC’s. That said, for us, or rather for my guy that sets up and manages all our (1% Apple / 99% Android) mobile devices, he likes TV the best for that. As soon as he unboxes a new device, he puts TV Quick Support on it, then remotes to the phone from his PC, sometimes 6 devices at a time, so he can use mouse and KB, and copy and paste creds right into it from a vault. Way faster than holding in in his hands.

Address book is great too, user calls with a problem, have them touch TVQS, and it pops up out of the address book on my guys side, and he is connected and fixing in seconds with the least effort on both sides. That alone was enough for me to keep it. I made sure to lightly verbally abuse our very cute sounding rep, during our calls prior to signing… :laughing::laughing:

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The harassment of perpetual license holders will end eventually. Autodesk did this when they shifted their products to subscription. While the older stuff still works, it’s not so comfortable 10 years down the line. Teamviewer will see that people will eventually migrate over as support and UX march on.

15+ Years ago I owned a small software company. I switched to the subscription based sales model way before M$ or most others did. It was the smart move. Lower up-front sales, but recurring revenue for a longer period of time. It also gave the customer some assurance that we would/could continue supporting the product.

I’m not saying this is entirely better for the customer’s pocketbook, but a software company can’t support a product indefinitely based on a one-time fee. In this age of constant cybersecurity threat, having supported software in the Enterprise is necessary. So while I sympathize with those who don’t like the model, I’m not sure I see a viable alternative.

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I bought perpetual license near 2012 but the problem was when the support finishes there is not more support or upgrade for the app, and when the customer elevate his teamviewer program at his side, you can not access any more with a lower licences. so … perpetual? yes, but what its cost.

the support for sales is excellent but the real support to solve situations is a pain in the ass, you can go to “forums” and there are some answers that can be a useful help but try to get direct support… is very difficult to find, but with a pair of hours of patience you can get a response from them. if you have a licence you can get a partner ID and get support from there, but perpetual does not have such support. in other words, you must go to a normal licences due perpetual will not longer any more, is something as having a Windows 97 perpetual licences, can you use it? yes, but is funtional? no.

A perpetual license is usable for forever, but 10 years support/patches is reasonable. RTFM and same goes for the License agreement.

I use Easy Vista, and their tools for RMM are quite good, apple and winders. I have not tried for mobile devices yet. It also supports RDP, VNC, SSH, gulp telnet, vpro, and of course EV Reach.

Its cludgier when you want to remote via token link, but it does that too (like TV). But devices connected via AD or Azure AD are pretty easy to find with their cloud connector.

Anyway horses for courses. We support almost all winders devices, and it works really well.
As for the perpetual versus subscription licenses, meh, this is old news. Yep you are paying more. In my opinion though the cadence of upgrades/support is more logical though, and it allows the vendors to stick with mostly newer code and patches. You wanted prices to go down? Really?

Generally, I don’t like subscription models. For the most part, I view them as a way to secure revenue without having to innovate as much.

That said, subscription models make sense sometimes. Teamviewer and some other remote connection software services are some of those times.

Unless you’re using Teamviewer for LAN connections only, then you need the ongoing services provided by Teamviewer’s servers. Without their servers making the hosts available, Teamviewer won’t work. Their servers are why even computers behind a cellular provider’s network are accessible. It doesn’t seem reasonable to me that you could buy the software once, and expect Teamviewer to keep their servers running and connected to the internet indefinitely.

Now if you’re using Teamviewer for LAN connections only, then the subscription model isn’t so great.

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There are different points to your long post…as I alway say…3 sides to every coin…

There are always guidelines to almost every forum. Like some already pointed out that you were not permitted to discuss 3rd party products and/or pricing…

There are a few things…

  • there are a lot of software that cannot work or cannot work properly when 2 or more machines are using different versions of the software. It is like v1 cannot connect to machine with v3 or v3 may not connect to v1 etc.

  • Perpetual license (even for Teamviewer) does say you can use it for more than 10 years…BUT support that includes free version updates and free major version upgrades are only provided when you have a valid support (of 10 years). Then that brings to the point above of using different machines with different versions.

  • You did bring up a point of MS Office XP…and for some reason, we have a few lappy still using MS Office XP on Win11 (due to some applications written in access that have issue with MS Office 2016 or later). MS never said that you are not allowed to use MS Office XP anymore if you had purchased the license (via MSVL or retail; OEM only if that machine is still running), just that MS would not have any more patches and that important updates are at a best-effort basis. These lappy cannot open .xlsx, pptx or .docx (which requires MS Office 2013 or later or a addition reader)