Business · For support firms
Remote support priced per technician, not per machine.
Most remote support tools meter the thing you do not control. Take on a client with four hundred desktops and your costs move before a penny of their money arrives. This one charges for the people doing the work — and the number of machines behind them never enters into it.
The arithmetic
Where per-machine pricing hurts.
The problem is not the size of the bill on day one. It is which way the bill moves when you win work.
Metered on their hardware
Your cost is driven by how many computers your clients happen to own. A client replacing twenty laptops, or opening a second office, raises your costs without raising your fee. You end up either absorbing it or going back to them to renegotiate, which is a conversation nobody wants.
Metered on your team
Five technicians is £24.75 a month, whether between them they look after 300 machines or 30,000. The number moves when you hire, which is exactly when you can afford it. You can price a support contract without first working out how much of the fee your tooling will take.
Four technicians, twenty-six client sites, a shade over nine hundred machines between them. Your cost is four licences — £237.60 for the year, paid once. Win a twenty-seventh client next month with another hundred and fifty machines and that figure does not move at all.
Day to day
The parts that matter when it is your job, not a hobby.
Machines grouped by client
Not one flat list of nine hundred computers. Each client site is its own group, and a technician is given the groups they work on. Finding the right machine takes seconds and nobody stumbles into the wrong company's server.
A log you can show a client
Who connected, to which machine, when, and for how long. Sessions can be recorded to video as well. This is the difference between saying “that was not us” and proving it.
One login each, two-factor on
Every technician gets their own account rather than a shared password. That is what makes the log meaningful, and it means an employee leaving is one account disabled rather than a password change across the firm.
Unattended access
Servers and machines in unstaffed offices install it as a background service, so you can reach them at three in the morning without asking anybody to read you a number. Included, not a paid extra.
Your name on the client
The program your client installs can carry your company's name, your icon and your server. It is your brand on their desktop rather than an advert for a tool they could go and buy themselves.
An answer for the questionnaire
Sessions encrypted end to end, brokered by a named server in the UK under your control, with source code anyone can read. Increasingly the difference between getting on a supplier list and not.
The honest bit
Who this is not right for.
- You want one system for everything. If you are shopping for remote support bolted onto ticketing, patching, monitoring and asset tracking, buy a platform that does all of it. This does one job and expects to sit next to your other tools.
- You need a supplier with a support desk behind it. We are a small UK business. You get email answered by somebody who knows the product, not a rota covering the clock.
- Nobody with you wants to look after a server. Then either take the hosted plan or stay where you are — self-hosting is real work and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
- You are two people and comfortably inside a cheap plan elsewhere. The saving will not repay the fortnight of moving everyone across. Come back when you are hiring.
Questions
Straight answers.
How does the price work if I take on a client with 200 machines?
It does not change. You pay for the people doing the supporting. Whether your technicians look after 50 computers or 5,000, the bill is the same, because the meter is on your side of the relationship, not your client's.
Can I put my own company name on it?
Yes. The client is built from source, so the name, the icon and the server it points at can all be yours before you hand it to a customer. Because the licence is AGPL-3.0 you must keep the original authors' copyright notices and make your source available to anyone you give the software to - which a link to a public repository satisfies.
Is there a record of who connected to what?
Yes. Every session is logged with the technician, the machine, the time and how long it lasted, and sessions can be recorded to video. That matters the day a client asks what was done on their server at half past four.
Can I stop a technician reaching a client they do not work on?
Machines are grouped by client site and access is granted per group, so a technician sees only the sites they are assigned to. When somebody leaves, you disable one login.
What do I tell a client's security questionnaire?
That remote sessions are encrypted between the two computers only; that they are brokered by a named server under your control, in the UK, not by a third-party cloud; that no third party can decrypt a session; and that the source code is public and can be reviewed. Those are all checkable claims, which is the point.
Keep reading
Related
Try it before you decide anything.
The client is free and the source is public. Download it, connect two of your own machines, and see whether it does what you need. Nothing to sign up for.