The walls we kept hitting
Like a lot of people, we used remote desktop tools for two things: reaching our own PCs, and helping family and friends with theirs. And we kept running into the same three problems.
- Sessions that cut out after a while, right in the middle of fixing something, so you had to start again and explain to the person on the other end why.
- Being told our use looked "commercial", then asked for large fees, paid a year up front, to keep helping the same handful of people.
- An outage on someone else's side that left us unable to reach any of our own PCs, with nothing we could do about it.
None of those is a technical limit. They're choices. So we made different ones, and built the tool we wanted to use. The short version of this story, with what we believe about privacy, control and pricing, is on our About us page.
What we decided it had to do
If you're comparing tools yourself, our checklist of what to look for in remote desktop software covers consent, pricing, sessions that cut out and more, and you can use it with any app.
Ask the person at the PC, every time
Remote access is powerful, and it's exactly what scammers abuse. So in RemoteAccessApp the person at the PC is in charge. Unless they've switched on unattended access at the PC itself, every connection shows an Allow remote access? prompt, and nothing is shown until they click Allow. While anyone is connected, a banner stays on their screen. They can switch to view-only or quit whenever they like. Sessions from the app are end-to-end encrypted, and we don't record them. If you're not sure which way you need it set up, attended or unattended: which one do you need? walks through five everyday situations.
A free plan you can actually use
The free plan covers up to 5 PCs and 5 saved hosts, with 3 open at once, for personal and commercial use alike, with no card and no session time limit. Unattended access is included, because reaching your own PC when you're away is the most basic thing a remote access app does. People who need more can move to Pro, billed monthly, with no year-up-front contracts and no "we think you're a business" surprises.
PCs and servers in one app
Most of us don't only look after Windows PCs. There's a Linux server, a NAS with a web admin page, a switch with a serial console. RemoteAccessApp puts them together: remote desktop and remote support, plus an SSH terminal, SFTP and FTP file managers, saved RDP and VNC connections, serial consoles and web admin panels, all in one Windows app. And when you're not at a Windows PC, your PCs open in any web browser, including on your phone.
Keep working when things go wrong
A session that drops reconnects by itself. PCs set up for local-network access connect directly over your own network, so they keep working even if our servers are having a bad day, and the status page tells you honestly when they are.
Why being Australian matters to us
We're a registered Australian company (ABN 64 683 623 065), and we build the product the way we'd want it built for our own families: plainly priced, honest about what it does, and respectful of people's privacy. The apps show no ads, have no trackers and send no analytics, and we never sell personal data. When something is a limitation, such as a browser session being encrypted but not end to end, we say so on the page rather than in the small print.
If you want the long version of how it's protected, the security white paper is written for IT teams and anyone curious.
Where we're going
We ship often, and every release is listed in plain English in what's new; this blog rounds them up too. If something gets in your way, tell us: the problems people send us are how the app gets better.
Thanks for trying RemoteAccessApp. If you're comparing it with what you use now, why choose RemoteAccessApp sums up what's different in one place. If you're switching from another tool, our switching guides take you through it in a few minutes.