SimDeskIf you run a support desk in India, you’ve probably felt it: the remote-support licence that was affordable a couple of renewals ago now lands as a line item someone in finance asks about. For a lot of teams that tool is TeamViewer, and the sticker isn’t the only thing that stings.
The three things that pushed us to switch
It wasn’t one big price hike — it was a pattern that made the cost hard to predict and hard to defend internally:
- Renewal shock — the number at renewal rarely matched the number we budgeted a year earlier.
- Commercial-use prompts and audits — a session getting flagged or blocked mid-support is the worst possible moment for it to happen.
- Per-device and tiered pricing — as we added machines and technicians, the cost climbed in steps we couldn’t always see coming.
TeamViewer is a capable product; none of this is a knock on what it does. The problem was the shape of the bill relative to how a growing support team actually works — more endpoints, more technicians, more sessions, every month.
What your options actually are
When the renewal quote arrives, there are really only four moves:
- Absorb it — pay the higher number and move on. Fine once; painful as a trend.
- Negotiate — sometimes works, but you’re negotiating the same pricing model again next year.
- Downgrade the plan — cheaper, but you usually give up seats, features or device counts you were relying on.
- Switch to a tool that doesn’t bill you for growing — free, with unlimited devices and no audits.
Why we ended up building our own
We support insurance brokers running our SAIBA software all over the country — non-technical users, locked-down machines, uneven bandwidth. We needed remote support a scared user could start in seconds, that our technicians could launch from the ticket they were already in, and that recorded itself for training and audit. Nothing off the shelf did all three at a price that made sense at our scale, so we built SimDesk — and now we run our whole desk on it and sell it to teams with the same problem.
The pricing decision was deliberate: SimDesk Remote Support is free — unlimited operators, unlimited devices, no commercial-use audits. There is no per-seat line to renegotiate and nothing that climbs as your endpoint count grows.
Before you switch, check these
Whatever you move to, don’t switch on price alone. Make sure the replacement covers the things you actually use every day:
- Attended support with no install or login for the customer (a code they read out).
- Unattended access for servers and always-on machines.
- File transfer, clipboard sharing and in-session voice.
- Session recording for training and audit.
- Security you can defend — explicit on-screen consent, encryption, and the certifications your industry expects.
SimDesk does all of the above, and it’s free — registration and email verification is the whole sign-up. If you want the detail against your current tool, the side-by-side comparison pages lay it out capability by capability.
The line item didn’t shrink — it disappeared. That one change is why the bill stopped surprising us.