Commercial use - Connection time out
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I got a reply by email. Basically, I was told to take a hike and they would not unblock me because my email address had a company name in it. The fact that the company hasn't existed for the last 6 years didn't make any difference.
I get the impression they are trying to unload all free users, perhaps to reduce the load on their servers?1 -
"Sent you a message."
Send me one as well please.
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@7leagueboot: I arrived at the same conclusion as yourself, free users might overload their infrastructure
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I've had no choice but to move over to a competitor for now (the same as @Closed account). It's a shame as if Teamviewer got their **bleep** together and provided a 'prosumer' tier I would've coughed up for it.
This hobbling of free accounts and tragically slow response to resolve (assuming they actually do agree I'm not a commercial user!) leaves a bad impression.
The competitor product I've gone over to will require a little bit of learning.
Note to Teamviewer mod: if you can't sort out our accounts then don't be surprised or throw a hissy fit when we're left no other option than to abandon your product for someone else's.
If you can a) sort out my account and b) offer an 'inbetween' paid product for power users then I'd be willing to take another look. Your product is a good one and I would be prepared to contribute toward it as a home user (say perhaps £50/year for example) but you would have to do away with this ridiculous auto-restriction of accounts especially as it's throwing up false positives!
I've been trying to work out what caused it to think I'm using it commercially and I wonder if it's because of my phone. I use Blokada to block ads on my phone and it does this by setting up a VPN loop-back. The VPN doesn't actually connect out to anywhere, it's designed to sink-hole ads but allow legit traffic through. I wonder whether Teamviewer's basic 'detection' sees a VPN and automatically assumes that no home user could ever possibly be using one and therefore defaults to 'COMMERCIAL USE DETECTED'? If so this is a pretty poor way of determining commercial use!
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I never used VPNs and my impression was that a simple thing like connected to a remote computer over the Internet or two simultaneous connections from a computer to the 2 other computers in the same LAN would trigger the commercial use suspected. Thankfully, it stopped for now, but I've added a new computer to my tiny little pool of computers I'm watching, I wonder how long until I'll be hit again (possibly at the next major version, when the detection algorithm will be tweaked again)
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Submit the form and request for unblocked. I gave up after 5 months of waiting....
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I too have moved, to a competitor with no learning curve that behaves more or less identically but is very reasonable priced. You are not allowed to mention names here so I can't.
I think we all owe it to ourselves to use the power of social media to influence others to stop using TV. I use it maybe once a month to a random friend who needs help and it flags me. What's more insulting? It says I have 5 minutes and cuts me off in about 20-30 seconds.
This sort of company fully deserves to lose their customers. The beauty of the nature of this software is a lot of us who use it have the upper hand. We can dictate what software OTHERS have to use to enlist our help. And with that we can change what OTHERS use. I for one have easily moved 10 others in the last couple of months. And will continue to do so. Spread the word.
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@JackHK wrote:Submit the form and request for unblocked. I gave up after 5 months of waiting....
That's first-class customer service right there... Assuming you've also jumped ship from Teamviewer by now?
I don't remember when my form went in but even their supposed 7-day SLA is too slow if they've already broken your account!
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@splow wrote:
I too have moved, to a competitor with no learning curve that behaves more or less identically but is very reasonable priced. You are not allowed to mention names here so I can't.
I think we all owe it to ourselves to use the power of social media to influence others to stop using TV. I use it maybe once a month to a random friend who needs help and it flags me. What's more insulting? It says I have 5 minutes and cuts me off in about 20-30 seconds.
This sort of company fully deserves to lose their customers. The beauty of the nature of this software is a lot of us who use it have the upper hand. We can dictate what software OTHERS have to use to enlist our help. And with that we can change what OTHERS use. I for one have easily moved 10 others in the last couple of months. And will continue to do so. Spread the word.
Agreed. Teamviewer seem to not have realised that those of us using it personally to help F&F are the more technical ones; often we also work in positions whereby we're either decision-makers (or key influencers) who have an input as to what solutions our employers or customers use in a commercial environment.
Our personal experiences 100% inform our professional choices and as I mentioned previously I will not be recommending Teamviewer to anyone at this stage - personally or professionally.2 -
Guys and girls, how do you manage to post so fast?!?
I can't keep up with reading your replies (and that changes a little from the TV support, eh? 0 -
Agreed totally!
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I have used TeamView at home for years to communicate between my iMac and a couple of Microsoft PC systems that are sat next to me. All of these are on my local subnet and I use TeamView rather than havind several monitors and keyboards to communicate with them as I only fire them up infrequently when I need to run programs that won't work on my Mac.
Today I ran TeamView to connect to a PC in order to run SDR# and it said Commercial Use Detected. It had never done that before so I tried to connect to the other PC and it said the same thing.
It occurs to me that two things have changed since the last time that I ran Teamview. I have installed ExpressVPN and Virgin have updated the firmware on my router and upped my broadband speed to 200Mbps. Is it possible that either of these is fooling the system into thinking that I am using in a commercial environment? It can't be because of my usage as all machines are on my local subnet and I only connect to them very infrequently.
Any ideas?
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It shows how much potentail TeamViewer is loosing... influencers are as important as buyers...
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This will get deleted by Teamviewer in a bit (they delete most of my messages saying I have mentioned competitors, when up to today I knew of no competitors) but one of our members pointed to **Third Party Product** which so far, today only, if a perfect subsitution... I hope they do not have a TeamView like automated policy that will give me the same problem in a month....
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wow, now TV is censoring the opinion that their system is stupid!
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TV is a German company.
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sign up for a yahoo email account and register that with TV
oh wait, Yahoo is a company too, haha
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@bazbsg wrote:sign up for a yahoo email account and register that with TV
oh wait, Yahoo is a company too, haha
If we cannot be honest with them, what's the point in having anything to do with them? They have chosen to be thoroughly dishonest so, now they have made their bed they must lie on it.
One thing they seem to have overlooked is how things happen so much quicker on the internet. Good news travels slowly but bad news spreads like wildfire! Just look at all the posts in this thread as a prime example. And, run a search for the exact error message you are getting to see how many other sites and forums are also talking about this. TV's competitors are making hay while the sun shines.
Any serious enterprise would have raced into damage control as quickly as possible. That means solving the problem for one's loyal users. It does NOT mean editing their posts and/or deleting anything negative being said about the company. Remember, there's no smoke without fire!
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At the bottom of this, and every page on this forum, it says "Get Started Now! It's free for personal use". That may have been true for the last few years, but as can be seen in this forum, it is no longer the case. Some users may still be lucky enough to be considered personal users, although who knows how long that will last? But many are being falsely accused of commercial use when it is patently false.
In other words, TV need to redefine what personal use is because using it to connect to a friend is no longer accepted as personal use. And as in my case, having an email address that uses a company name is also not permitted unless you purchase a business user license (ridiculous), which is a bit like saying you may not be employed.
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I work in a very, very large institution and have regular contact with senior management in the IT division - and work in the IT unit of my own division. Though I was using TV for personal use - and within the license terms - TV decided I wasn't and resolutely declined to deal with the attempt to demontrate my bona fides before being cut off or subsequent communications.
As a result I have now uninstalled TV on my home desktop and laptop, and, when asked - or when I recall the shabby treatment dished out to many who seem to have suffered similarly - will share my frank opinion of TV and assuming that corporate culture is just corporate culture and that there is no particular contempt for the users to whom free licenses were granted, andtherefore that it probably applies to all, will advise any and all to evaluate their options very carefully and tell them why I can no longer recommend them personally.
I have found a replacement. It seems Germans are very keen on this sort of software and replacements are not hard to find. Also seem to work well.
So long and thanks for the fish.
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According to the EULA, this is the only term applying to free personal use: The use of the Freemium Software is solely permitted for the Customer’s own, private, non-commercial purposes (e.g. free computer support for a spouse/partner).
Why would anyone need to provide remote support to one's spouse/partner? Presumably you live together so you have direct access to his/her PC. If you are separated or divorced, how likely is it that you would want to provide your ex with remote computer support?
In my case, I have been using it to assist 2 computer illiterate friends who live 100's of kilometres away from me. I have always believed that was precisely what TV meant by personal use. I don't charge them anything for helping them out and never have done. In fact, I don't know anyone that charges their friends for helping them with anything, not unless they want to end their friendship.
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Indeed, time to bin TV.... silly company... actually I suspect the have a 3rd party monitoring this forum, and supply the responses for the commercial vs private use and they are desparately trying to hide their underperformance from the actual TV company.... but that is TV's fault too... not to be monitoring all this... indeed, they have lost me a a positive influencer...
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So before I, very sadly, turn my back on a platform that has been invaluable to me and my family over the last several years, I just want to leave a few comments for the guys and girls at Teamviewer (and for everybody else, I guess):
1. I do understand that companies need to make money. As such, Teamviewer is perfectly within their rights to charge for their services. It does not make much sense for a lot of us to insist that TV has to continue to provide their services for free if we, in turn, do not deliver value to the company, through, say, actively contributing to growing its user base. If we don't like the changed terms and conditions and how they are enforced, we are free to leave, which I will have to do now.
2. (And I hope you are paying attention, TV): The commercial license is catastrophically mispriced for casual users. I understand how TV is defining commercial use - but in order for this 'commercial use' to justify an investment of SGD 39 _per month_ (i.e. SGD 468 per year) for a vastly reduced performance (only 3 devices) your product needs to generate value for your users at least equal to that amount.
If somebody were to use the product to, say, provide support for friends and family 80% of the time and to occasionally retrieve a file for their personal use from a home PC while at work, it seems that this will be considered corporate use as soon as the PC being accessed remotely happens to be downloading emails. It is also worth remembering that the lines between personal and corporate use of devices for many, many users these days are blurred to say the least, which many large corporations are now taking into consideration by providing their employees with PCs where the corporate part is 'sandboxed' and which can therefore be accessed for personal use even though they are licensed to the company, running a VPN, etc.
After many years of building a very loyal and positive community of users, it seems Teamviewer is now at risk of destroying an enormous amount of goodwill and affection through a very heavyhanded intervention. One more thing that I have not seen commented on an awful lot in this thread is the question of what data exactly TV's algorithm is analyzing in order to determine 'commercial use'. One can only hope that no personal data is used and disclosed to TV staff in the process...
So long story short and very much in agreement with one of the recent comments above: a useful option for TV to consider would be a mixed-use 'prosumer' account whereby friends and family can still be supported as usual (i.e. un an umlimited number of devices) while charging me a moderate amount (up to SGD 50 per year) to access up to three 'core devices' (e.g. my home PC, my work PC, my laptop) for a set number of times (e.g. 100) per year. (Maybe with an option to buy credits priced in cents rather than dollars if the set number of times per year turns out to be insufficient.)
Just a suggestion.
For me, this won't really matter any more. Once I switch, it is very unlikely that I ever return. I suspect this is the same for many others who have left their comments in this thread over the last 2+ years.
Good luck, Teamviewer, I really liked your platform. But as they say, there's plenty of other fish in the sea...
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@Closed accountThanks for the heads-up on the alternative. It works really well and is fast.
It took me a bit of time to adapt to the difference in its interface but that was like switching from right hand drive to left hand drive; everything is there, it's just in a different position.
As far as TV is concerned, I have seen nothing that indicates the company has had a change of heart over its policy of killing off free users. So, why is this thread marked "Solved"?
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Sorry to hear that, but I am doing the same !!! I've been escalated for 5 months with no success, it's time to give up!
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I have been using it non-commercially for years and only recently it triggered the "Commercial use suspected". I wonder why all of a sudden this happened, I haven't done anything to trigger it and I use it lightly with both PCs signed in on my personal account. The license prices are a joke and they are so expensive. Was good while it lasted. I am already using some alternatives but too bad TV was my favorite. Everything comes to an end and you greedy TV devs brought this to yourselves. Good bye and cheers!
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Agreed totally!
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