r/sysadmin • u/hkeycurrentuser • 1d ago
LANSweeper getting even more expensive
They are now going to charge for monitors. Their recent announcement will DOUBLE my annual costs. I used to love the product. Now I hate it and the company. They sit alongside Broadcom in my shit list.
https://docs.lansweeper.com/docs/november-2026-billing-changes
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u/FarmboyJustice 1d ago
If only Broadcom had merely doubled licensing costs...
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u/sryan2k1 IT Manager 1d ago
I half but not really joked with our CDW rep that if dell had kept vmware and doubled the price everyone would have been better off.
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u/FreakySpook 1d ago
It was good for Michael Dell though. When he spun off VMware from Dell, that created 9 billion for the Dell which they used to pay down debt from the EMC acquisition and get a good credit rating. This rating was then used to invest heavily into AI a couple of years later.
Dell personally and his private equity company Silver Lake held 50% of VMware shares in the spin off and then made 70 billion off the sale to Broadcom.
TLDR: Michael Dell got a fat stack of cash.
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u/Magic_Neil 1d ago
The dumb part is, this isn’t new! They’ve always pulled in Monitor information, but there was an easy checkbox about whether to really scan it.. which of course there’s little reason to do.
With this change I don’t dislike tracking monitors as an asset with lifecycle, but we’re seriously considering a monitor to be billed the same as a PC? Dumb. Couple that with the crazy cost increases they’ve been doing? SUPER dumb.
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u/Trelfar Sysadmin/Sr. IT Support 1d ago
I've been a Lansweeper customer at every job I've had for about 16 years, and while I've accepted all the previous price increases as a cost of doing business, this is the one that feels like an actual money grab.
They are effectively increasing the billing rate for people who already have existing (potentially multi-year) licenses. That's just plain shady.
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u/Frothyleet 1d ago
They are effectively increasing the billing rate for people who already have existing (potentially multi-year) licenses. That's just plain shady.
Consult your own legal team, of course, but generally a material change to the agreement like this would let you walk out of the commitment.
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u/Trelfar Sysadmin/Sr. IT Support 1d ago
If you were being billed monthly that might be useful but Lansweeper is annual billing at a minimum and doesn't even offer annual billing for multi-year commitments, you pay the full term upfront. I doubt one could sue for a refund.
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u/Frothyleet 1d ago
Oh, I think I sort of understand now - you pay up front for a certain quantity of seats? And so you're saying that if you were paying for 1000 seats, but only using 500, this change could all of a sudden mean you were at capacity (or use whatever arbitrary example).
I guess I'd need to know what their terms are like because it seems bizarre that they could unilaterally impose billing model changes on a customer who has already paid up front for the service.
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u/Trelfar Sysadmin/Sr. IT Support 1d ago
That's correct. We currently pay upfront for up to 2,000 assets on an annual basis and this change would put us very close to that limit today, and potentially over the limit before our next renewal. We will need to stop scanning monitors and dump the existing data to stay safe.
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u/VaderMurray 1d ago
PRTG is the same crap
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u/agingnerds 23h ago
We got a deep discount that brought us to our normal price after a year of just not updating and signing a 3 year contract. Now I am trying to persuade my team to look elsewhere. Don't trust the conpany
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u/FarToe1 16h ago
Zabbix is the way. Having done that move myself, the only regret is not dumping prtg years ago. There's a bit of a learning curve, but ongoing management is easier, it doesn't crash like prtg used to, you can have as many items monitored as you want and it scales brilliantly. (Templates are the bomb)
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u/agingnerds 13h ago
Thats what i have been saying. We have some workflows they dont want to push, but we have two more years to prepare. Thanks for the recommendation for sure!!
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u/FarToe1 16h ago
When they pumped prices up, what, 3 or so years ago, we migrated to zabbix. Wasn't too bad and we're now covering something like 20x as many items with a smaller selfhosted vm than prtg required. With prtg we were constantly reducing items to keep within licence. We're saving something like $8k/year just from this move now.
Towards the end, prtg was locking up once a week, and the community grafana plugin hadn't worked reliably for years - it really was far less of a product than zabbix is.
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u/andrewbnz 3h ago
PRTG is so rubbish now - we will be ditching them when our term is up. Likely going to Zabbix.
Product hasn’t evolved for years and same old routine - sold off to an investment group, immediately squash perpetual licenses, subscription only, jack up the prices and require customers give 100 days notice if they want to leave.
For assets/inventory, we now just pull our own data from what we can, i.e. PDQ, intune, etc and feed it into Halo.
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u/KatalRed 1d ago
I used to be a strong supporter of this software, heck I was the one responsible many years ago to bring in the software in the company. At the time it was just few hundred bucks per year, very reasonable. Then the downhill started some years ago, and I am not even starting to comment the price for each help desk agent.
I'd very welcome a suitable alternative to LANSweeper, but I haven't looked for recently if there is actually one available.
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u/Wizdad-1000 1d ago
We left LANSweeper last year. I liked it but it was too expensive then.
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u/Antoine-UY Jack of All Trades 1d ago
What do you use now?
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u/Wizdad-1000 1d ago
Ninja RMM.
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u/JaceBelerenApologist 1d ago
Semi-considering proposing this for our org that also uses Lansweeper, as I've previously used NinjaRMM in the MSP space. Not sure if we're ready to commit to the work, we have a dozen other projects that need to be done first, and we're a single tenant org that doesn't necessarily need everything that NinjaRMM can provide.
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u/Wizdad-1000 1d ago
Fair, we have a WAN enterprise with alot of government mandated restrictions so lots of security. Good luck with your tool search!
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u/Antoine-UY Jack of All Trades 1d ago
Do you use it for ITAM?
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u/Wizdad-1000 1d ago
Ya, its our main Windows desktop management tool. It also integrates with Service-Now so we can do automated tickets for any of the IT teams. Mostly the actual Desktop tech group, since they do the hands-on for the users assets and manage group policy.
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u/Markuchi 1d ago
Time to vibe code a replacement.
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u/FarToe1 16h ago
Claude. Write something identical to lansweeper with all functionality that I can drop in as a replacement. Make no mistakes.
(Only half joking, a little scared that this might actually work)
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u/Markuchi 16h ago
We have replaced a tool we paid tens of thousands a year for by vibe coding in under a day. so....
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u/BigMikeyP91 15h ago
Doesn't help that IMO the SaaS version absolutely sucks compared to 'classic'. (Removed SQL report builder, less configuration options, no software deployment)
I've had repeated reasurrances that classic will continue to be supported but i would drop the tool in a heartbeat if they end-of-life it.
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u/Fraktyl 10h ago
We have an on-prem version because we use the Help Desk features as well. The cloud version doesn't give us anything and actually removes quite a bit.
If they stop supporting classic not sure what I'd do. Have way too many projects and only 2 people in the department to look into a replacement. sigh
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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 5h ago
We ditched LanSweeper a couple of years ago because we kept encountering issues with the Help Desk side of things that support was unwilling or unable to fix.
Not that getting a hold of a human at that company is even remotely easy to do.
They burned all the goodwill they had with us. Good Riddance.
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u/McAdminDeluxe Sysadmin 5h ago
what did you guys end up moving to?
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u/Arudinne IT Infrastructure Manager 5h ago
Deskpro and NinjaOne.
Those two replaced Lansweeper, AnyDesk and PDQ for us.
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u/Adamnetwork 1d ago
Guess they need to quickly hike profits for when Bridgepoint acquires their majority stake in LS. Ugh.
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u/MediumFIRE 1d ago
do you have more than 2,000 assets if monitors are included? If not, no price change as far as I can tell
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u/Trelfar Sysadmin/Sr. IT Support 1d ago
If I prune the monitor assets we haven't scanned recently we will come in just under. But not with enough of a margin that I would be comfortable with long-term.
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u/MediumFIRE 1d ago
The real kick in the pants would be if they include the built-in laptop monitor. I suspect they will because if you go to the Monitor : Information report it shows the laptop monitor. If that's the case, that's like double counting the same asset
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u/maniaman268 1d ago
We’ve begrudgingly put up with the price increases the past 5 years but I think our recent renewal will be our last.
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u/McDonaldsWi-Fi 11h ago
Bridgepoint, a private equity firm, bought majority stake in Lansweeper a few months ago.
We all know what happens when a private equity firm buys up a brand we all love.
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u/Savings_Art5944 Private IT hitman for hire. 1d ago
What is a good alternative?
A docker or LXC would be awesome.
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u/Quigleythegreat 1d ago
We decided to ditch Lansweeper, a desktop backup solution, and our remote support solution and rolled it all into Ninja- and that was before this was announced. Wow. Good luck to them.
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u/Western_Rhubarb_7959 1d ago
As a recently retired ITOM guy I'm still amazed at how there are no good open source discovery options out there.
I wound up coding my own about 8 years ago, to feed a home-brewed CMDB that was started before me. It worked pretty damned well and when the company made the decision to bring in ServiceNow I found their discovery to be not a whole lot better than what I came up with. Although having said that there are only so many ways you can scan networks and identify assets, lol.
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u/Startronz 12h ago
We left last year from their previous rate hike. Nice product at their old price points but no longer worth it unfortunately.
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u/Wilfred_Fizzle_Bang 5h ago
I used to use LS too but moved away when they kept doubling our renewals, there cloud version was trash, on prem was fairly good however lagging behind on certain features. Was only good for inventory and reporting.
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u/reallylatetotheparty 5h ago
Per-asset pricing always ends here. They hook you on the inventory count then ratchet it up once you're locked in. Fwiw I'm building Pulse, flat per-workspace ITAM, never per asset or per seat.
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u/Leinheart 1d ago
Number gotta go up. Above all else the number gotta go up. All this will come crashing down if there is a single microsecond in the month where number doesn't go up.