I think it’s if you want to have user management. There’s some sort of admin console you have to pay for, but I don’t use it.

To be honest I had kind of forgotten it was a thing. If you’re using this for a business then you might want to link it to your OIDC (Microsoft account etc.) and therefore pay for those extra features.

However if you use it to connect to your own devices or those of your friends like you would with TeamViewer (via device IDs and per-device passwords) as I do, you won’t have to pay for it.

Give it a go and see how you get on!

Been using them for years.

It’s completely free, open source and has:

• Unsupervised (for headless servers) or supervised (helping out relatives) access
• Easily file transfers
• Cross-copy paste
• Identification server (what gives out connection IDs) can be self-hosted or you can use theirs for free
• Can control PCs from mobile app (though not vice versa apparently they support this now!)
• Experimental web browser client.

EDIT: I forgot, but it’s also much better at compressing video effectively than realVNC, which is what I used to use. Performance and latency remains fairly good even at low bitrate.

For a little while, I even used to play point and click games remotely with my brother over it. Probably too much latency for an action game though.

If your kid has half a brain he’ll do what we did as kids when porn sites were blocked on the home WiFi: He’ll just get a VPN.

And when VPN websites were blocked on the home WiFi, we’d just download their apps on mobile data.

Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Better to educate your kids on their natural urges and letting them use the more moderated sites than have them go down the more dodgy rabbitholes. No kink shaming but some of the things people do are nasty.

The exit plan from WhatsApp is quite simple. Start by installing Signal and setting it up – it takes only a couple of minutes. Then, resume any WhatsApp conversations on Signal if that person is already a Signal user. If they are not, then switch to regular text messaging and gently suggest to that person to switch over to Signal.

Sadly for me, this doesn’t really work for some relatives as

• They live abroad and the cost of sending text messages abroad is not insignificant
• Some are so tech un-savvy that even installing a new app by themselves is too much.

All I can do for those relatives is to leave WhatsApp installed but take away basically every permission I can, including running in the background.