Anti-virus and spyware companies had to be among the first software companies to realize that a cash cow the whole idea of subscriptions on top of already expensive software. In an industry that is built on exasperating fears of infected machines this constant price gouging is one of the reason in my opinion why many anti-virus and spyware applications get turned off or never kept up to date.

So it is really nice to see this post from Alex Eckelberry the CEO of Sunbelt Software a major player in the anti anti-virus and anti spyware software industry where he talks about the business model of companies in the security industry and the pricing models. In the post he talks about a survey that hey did concerning the current trend of multiple computers within a home.

Back in February, we were doing a survey for our upcoming security product, VIPRE (shipping later this month), and our head of marketing noticed something interesting: On average, about 35% of the respondents had more than 3 PCs in their household. (21% responded with three computers, 28% responded with two computers and 17% responded with one computer.)

What they came away with from this is that a larger; and growing, number of households are now running multiple computers and as such the old pricing model for their products just didn’t cut it any more. So Sunbelt has taken an unprecedented move to totally revamp their pricing models that from what I can figure after reading the post is really one that will benefit the users of their products.

For the first time that I can think of - especially in the commercial security software business Sunbelt is going to begin offering a new unlimited home license program

So, after further discussion and some testing, we’ve formally launched our new Unlimited Home Site License program. All of our consumer products have this in place right now, but it will also be available for VIPRE.
This is an unlimited license — it works for as many computers as you have at home, whether 3, 10, 50 or 100 computers. No guilt, no BS. No limits.

I think that this is a great idea and as a past customer for their Kerio firewall; which in my opinion is one of the best firewalls out there, I think this is a great move by Sunbelt. It is nice to see a company that isn’t placing outrageous profits over being able to fairly provide their customers with a fair deal.

Conversation Tags: anti virus, anti spyware, security, Sunbelt Software