David, do you know if what you thought was going to happen with the next release (3.1 is now out) was implemented? Meaning, a person with a single Pro license could install it on as many of the machines they manage from as needed?
That would be a MAJOR sticking point for me purchasing a Pro license.
I currently have a single home desktop and 2 personal laptops I've also connected out from my dad's house, where he has a single desktop and single laptop. I also have installed on 2 or 3 desktop PCs at the church i am a part of and am the volunteer tech admin/tech support. Those are all non-profit use cases for connecting into and out from. Any of the desktops I connect in to are, more often than not, using unattended access.
For the schools I work for (my paid job), I have 3 work owned desktops that are mine that I may connect out from, as well as several potential laptops. I connect into the desktops using unattended mode frequently. I also have at least one "management PC" at each of my schools where I don't have my own desktop PC. If I'm remoting into one of those, it would almost always be using unattended mode. At our educational CoOp office, i've also set up the finance lady to be able to remote into her work desktop PC from home, so she could access her financial software. I use either UltraVNC or Microsoft Remote Desktop to remote to any other end-user device/server within the school districts or Coop (No MSP360 Remote Desktop/Connect).
For personal use (connecting into my home PC, my dad's, one of the church devices), I honestly have a hard time coughing up a yearly license. I've also used TeamViewer in the past to connect to other friends' and family members' PC to help them. But, generally in those use cases, the friend/family member could approve the connection if using the free version, so free would work in those cases (but that is the minority of my use case on the personal end). I would "consider" purchasing a $89 a year for my personal use, but would be much more likely if it was less expensive, or if I could make a one-time purchase.
For work use, I could see my Coop paying a yearly $89 for me to use. But I couldn't see them paying $89 for each machine that I use (including home/personal devices), that I may use to use to connect to one of the few RD/Connect machines in the schools and Coop that I remote into. I'd really love my 3 district tech directors and our 1 district tech assistant to also be able to use the unattended access into our management PCs. And what would be fantastic, is to be able to purchase the manged licence to push out the agent to all of our District and Coop PCs and Macs and let any of our tech staff remote into.
Last time i talked to sales, there were still enough items not working on the manged client side, and I'm thinking the pricing might have been prohibitive for us to have moved forward with. I haven't talked to sales again lately, though one has reached back out to me, so i need to. If memory serves me right, there were several client settings that couldn't be set in the management console when I had demo'd it (including not being able to set/see/manage the encryption and MFA settings. Maybe this has improved in the last few months???
The other work use-case where i had used the free product, COVID in March 2020. Me and my other district tech staff installed Remote Assistant on about 100-150 Kindergarden through 4th grade student devices that were getting sent home. We wanted to be able to support those students at home if needed. Those devices don't go home now, so we discontinued that usage, but it was great for the time students were at home! (we copied the config files from a single install onto all other devices, so they all had the same PIN code, and a batch file that we used to accomplish it with, also logged every install out to a location on our network, so we knew which machines had it installed and configured. (fyi, batch file ran the RA installer, then copied our config file over, then we finished the install where each machine got it's own unique machine ID.)
At the current time, I've rolled Connect back to the last version of MSP360 Remote Desktop on all the machines I use and turned off automatic updating, so that I can continue using it. I'm sure this will stop working at some point, just like older versions of Remote Assistant stopped being supported and working.
I've gotten Microsoft Remote Desktop through RD Gateway (and free Cisco Duo MFA) set up at two of my districts, so honestly I could completely drop using any other product for those two locations. I'd keep using UltraVNC/MS Remote Desktop to connect from the management PC/server to any other device within that network. But, I don't have that set up at my other school or the Coop.
Long and windy, sorry about that, but figured it would be good feedback for you in seeing how I personally have been using the free product for the last 2 or 3 years.