Another freebie bites the dust: LogMeIn pulls free remote access
It may not be a flood, but it's definitely a trickle. More software vendors are paring back “free” or freemium offerings. This week it's LogMeIn curtailing the free version of LogMeIn remote access.
Context & Ripple Effects
LogMeIn's move lands two weeks after file-sharing service Droplr discontinued its free accounts, and it extends a line that goes back further: Google's 2012 decision to rein in the free version of its software, and The Wall Street Journal's 2012 examination of when freemium fails as a business model. The pattern is consistent enough that Gigaom calls it a trickle rather than a flood — individual vendors trimming free tiers one at a time rather than an coordinated retreat.
What makes this instance notable is scale and reach: LogMeIn's free remote-access product was one of the most widely used utilities of its kind, and the story was picked up same-day by Computerworld, TechCrunch, BetaNews, TUAW and MobileSyrup alongside LogMeIn's own announcements — unusual breadth for a pricing change, reflecting how many users the decision touches.
First-order effects
- Millions of existing LogMeIn Free users lose remote access to their own computers unless they convert to a paid Pro subscription or migrate to another tool, making this one of the larger forced-conversion events among prosumer utilities.
- For LogMeIn, a company public since its 2009 IPO, the change swaps an unmonetized user base for subscription revenue on a service whose costs it has been carrying since launch.
Second-order effects
- Rivals in remote access — TeamViewer, Splashtop and the rest of the category — get a window to court displaced free-tier users, and every one of them now faces the same question about whether their own free tiers are acquisition tools or liabilities.
- The move also pressures LogMeIn's other freemium bets: its Cubby cloud storage service, launched in 2012 and positioned directly against Dropbox and Box, sits in a market where free tiers are the main competitive weapon, so consistency argues either for Cubby's free tier to tighten too or for LogMeIn to defend it harder.
Third-order effects
- If the Droplr-then-LogMeIn sequence keeps repeating, freemium stops functioning as a permanent tier and becomes a de facto trial period — reshaping how consumer and prosumer software is priced and pushing casual users toward either paying or open-source alternatives.
- For the broader SaaS market, each high-profile pullback lowers the reputational risk of the next one: once a category leader like LogMeIn charges for what it gave away, competitors' free tiers read as temporary subsidies rather than commitments, which structurally raises prices across the category over time.
The trend: Consumer and prosumer software vendors are retiring perpetual free tiers in favor of subscriptions, with each prominent pullback — Google in 2012, Droplr and LogMeIn in January 2014 — normalizing the next vendor's retreat from freemium.