TeamViewer

TeamViewer is free for personal use only, and it uses certain rules to try and determine if someone is violating those terms. If they suspect your use is not personal, you will get a message saying that they suspect, or even think they're sure, that you're using TeamViewer commercially. From that moment on, the software will be severely restricted by closing every session after about 10 seconds.

After years of using TeamViewer to access my home desktop while I'm ouf of the house, I somehow managed to trigger this. Factors that people suggest can lead to the commercial use suspicion are running the program on a Server edition of Windows, in an Active Directory domain, or regularly opening a lot of sessions to many different computers. None of this was the case for me. What I suspect triggered it in my case, was a high number of reconnections. I had an issue with my computer which I couldn't wait to get home to try and figure out. I needed to reboot the system often to do that, every time closing and re-opening the TeamViewer session. The day after, my account was locked.

TeamViewer offer a way to ask them to look at your case in person, and determine if you've been falsely flagged. It says it will take around a week. After I did that, I got back an e-mail telling me that looking at my usage data, they were unable to determine that my usage was non-commercial. Which, given my usage pattern, can only mean that it's a standard reply and they didn't really look at it. It did, however, include a form for me to fill out and sign to attest my personal use. That's been about three weeks ago and I haven't heard back.

I'm writing this just to inform people about this possibility of being locked down, and the process involved. It's not meant as a complaint towards TeamViewer. They do offer a service for free, and the fact that they even offer an appeal process is very commendable. And I understand that they can't spend too many resources on handling those requests, since they are from people who are not likely to become paying customers in the near future.

I will add, though, that I might have considered paying for a license even if my use is strictly non-commercial, just because I enjoy the service and I would be fine with supporting it financially. However, even their most basic license is so expensive that it's clearly aimed at professionals who use remote access for customer service. It's not reasonable to pay more than $400 a year for an individual just wanting to remotely control their computer.

In the meantime, I have switched to the alternative AnyDesk software, which is also free for personal use. They don't seem to have such an automated suspicion system, and work more by offering licensed users additonal features that are helpful for professional use. Their basic license is also less than a fifth of the price of TeamViewer's reaching a price range that might be justifiable even for personal use.

Update, November 15: It's now almost three months ago that I initiated the appeal process, and I haven't heard back from the people at TeamViewer. Again, this is only informational – I'm not upset at them, as it's a free service and it's their right to refuse to offer it to me. In the meanwhile, I've grown very fond of AnyDesk. It's an excellent software and service, so I doubt I'd even re-install TeamViewer if they replied to me at this point.

Update 2019: A few months back I tried using TeamViewer again and the block seems to have been lifted. I don't know when that might have happened since, as I mentioned, I'm generally using AnyDesk now when I need remote access. For the same reason I also didn't use TeamViewer for multiple, or longer, connections anymore, but it did let me access my computer for a few minutes, which was not the case in the "banned" state. I checked my e-mail and spam filter archives but couldn't find any further messages from TeamViewer, so if they did unblock me due to my request, they didn't actively notify me.

[Edited by Anamon, November 15]

[Edited by Anamon, June 03]

It was really good until it was turned into an unusable mess. First, you'll get "Commercial use suspected" nag screens all the time, then it would outright stop working, timing out each of your sessions about a minute in and not letting you reconnect for 10 minutes.

Beware of this product.

After the first ~7 days of using the TeamViewer product, they will cripple the product and do there very best to annoy you into purchasing it. Once you purchase there "life time, one time purchase" everything will work fine for <6 months before they release a new version (every six months for the last 5 years now). After the update when you send your customers the older version that is compatible with your version of team viewer, the first thing your customers will see when launching the product is a notification to update. making their version not comparable with yours.

Its not a life time, one time purchase. its a ~$800 every six month purchase per seat. ($8,000 for 5 years)

Beware of their licencing scam

Like most people I have been a big fan of TeamViewer since the early days but since the latest version it has gone down hill very fast. being suspected for commercial use, having sessions of 1 minute and than a cooldown of 10 min. its just terrible and there is no way of appealing this.

The experience of TeamViewer free tier has slowly degraded over the last year or so. I have used TeamViewer for 8-9 years now and I'm about done. The only thing I have used TeamViewer for has been for remoting into family member computers to do some minor maintenance. After getting popups for using TeamViewer on business networks for personal use and being harassed about buying a license. Getting forcefully disconnected and blocked from making any other connections for a duration of time due to "timeouts" I am finally saying sayonara. Thanks for all the fish but your current fish are rotten. The free tier has been one of the better tiers I've seen in terms of the competition, but their license prices are too expensive for what I do to justify getting it for what I do. I will most likely move onto JumpDesktop since they have a 1 time price that is justifiable.

[Edited by User4133612, April 09]