Free? Really? Posted  July 17, 2007 By Steve Dispensa

By far, the most common question I get about PhoneFactor is, "How can you give it away?" This is a reasonable question, of course; I just didn’t quite expect it to come up so often. Let me try to explain our thinking here.

PhoneFactor is a free product, and we plan on keeping it free going forward. We’ll support it through e-mail, the PhoneFactor Forum, this blog, and via paid phone support. (And, for a limited time, phone support is free as well.)

PhoneFactor runs on any Windows computer (2000+), and includes the following features:

• Unlimited users
• Unlimited authentications
• Secure any RADIUS client (either as a proxy to another RADIUS server or using Windows Domain auth)
• Secure any Microsoft IIS5+ website (including Outlook Web Access, Citrix, and more)
• Account import from Microsoft Active Directory
• Reporting, web-based management, and much more!

We may grow the feature list in the free product. In any case, we are committing to supporting, maintaining, and enhancing the current product going forward.

Of course, we have to pay the rent, so we do indeed plan on charging for additional, enterprise-oriented features, which we’ll start rolling out over the coming months. Almost all of the features we have on the roadmap for fee-based upgrades are designed to address large enterprise needs.

If you want PhoneFactor delivered in the form of a hosted, managed, supported service, contact Positive Networks Sales and we’ll be happy to help you out.

So, the bottom line is this: we set out to build a really cool, useful product that would address the basic two-factor authentication needs in the market, and I think we succeeded. Certainly there are customers with advanced needs, and we’re working hard on delivering additional functionality for them. But I suspect most customers will be well served with the released PhoneFactor product, and I hope they use it and love it. And spread it!

I hope this helps clarify our direction here. Feel free to ping me if you have questions.

-Steve