ScreenConnect (now ConnectWise Control) Pricing Changes

Written by William Roush on October 19, 2015 at 5:11 pm

On Friday 10/16/2015 ScreenConnect announced a pricing increase for self-hosted clients, from the $325 entry cost to $2,195, changing my opinion greatly on whether or not ScreenConnect is right for you.

I did a review awhile ago about ScreenConnect boasting how much of a good solution it is for companies that want a cost-effective alternative for remote support, I think it’s time to take that recommendation back.

I will be updating this article as more news arrives.

This is a good start to my week…

What this means for legacy customers

Right now legacy customers are able to put in their old license and get the old licensing deals, while they didn’t have to do this, I’ve had companies go back on their word after the dust had settled, so I’m not hedging any bets that we won’t be next.

I very well may be dropping my license regardless simply because I can’t see this ending well and might as well jump on a product I see as more healthy long-term.

What this means for new customers

New customers have to pay $2,195 for an on-premise license plus $795 for each additional tech. This base license does come with 3 technician seats and up to 10 simultaneous sessions per tech.

Technician Seats

These appear to only be taken when a technician has an open connection, so you should be able to have 5 techs logged into a 3 tech licensed system, with only any 3 of them with open connections at any one time.

Unknowns

10 Concurrent connections

What is with this push for a large number of concurrent connections? If it’s anything like the last setup it means that one person can have 10 windows open to other machines. I’ve sometimes found that two or possibly three would be helpful, but always jumped sessions instead, with old pricing it was cheaper to just buy two licenses! I am curious if there are people out there pushing techs to sit actively connected to 10 machines at once (I’ve worked at an MSP before, I bounced around machines at one time, but there is a limit… I’ve only got one mouse and keyboard, everybody).

My take

I feel like it’s VMware’s VRAM fiasco all over again, pricing makes little sense, this only hurts customers — not helps them, competitors will jump all over this as a way to say “look at ScreenConnect, expensive, fewer features, use our product”, which is exactly what happened to VMware, they made their customers mad and they gave their competitors lots of ammo

What I’m curious about is whether or not there is some reason for the move, is there a high number of support calls coming in and ScreenConnect is having problem servicing them all? The forums have some complaints as to the response time over the past… I wouldn’t know, I’ve never had to call them. Unfortunately ScreenConnect hasn’t communicated any of this out…

2 thoughts on “ScreenConnect (now ConnectWise Control) Pricing Changes

  1. Jeff

    Hi William,

    I read your articles on ScreenConnect and I was hoping you would be willing to tell me if you found a replacement that you like. Very informative articles, by the way, but they were written a while ago.

    I’ve encountered more and more smart firewalls that are blocking ScreenConnect traffic. I am curious if you’ve found any remote control solution that works better than ConnectWise Control.

    Thanks for you time,

    Jeff

    Reply

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