Hello Derek,
Thank you for your message.
In what way are we customers paying if it is not in money?
Free license users are helpful in several ways:
- They help spread the word about Remote Utilities.
- Many of our free license users end up purchasing a
commercial license when they exceed the free license limits.
- Reporting bugs in the software and giving us ideas on improving the program.
Who and how is supporting this company? Is it only large-scale users who pay for more features/computers?
The only source of our financing are our profits. This is boring and not something TechCrunch or Mashable will be willing to write about :)
Also, why is the self-hosted server software free?
Because the competition is fierce.
You'd think we'd have to pay for that, at least, because if we are not using your software for the internet-ID connection, you don't have our information on your servers (but we hope we can trust you anyway?)
Information that goes through our ID servers is encrypted. We cannot read it anyway. And yet, we also provide the self-hosted server for companies who need even more security and who cannot trust just any third-party developer or cloud hosting provider.
You can also refer to
this FAQ page, and specifically the second question on that page. It lists all possible cases when Remote Utilities may contact our servers (e.g. update, Internet-ID connection etc.) and all of them can be either disabled, or replaced with self-hosted alternative such as the self-hosted server.
Let me know if you have other questions.
