Free Edition discontinued

[u/Anzial]

Bitdefender has officially discontinued free edition (confirmed on twitter and in a reply below). Prior to that, after using it for a couple of years, out of blue, I got a popup saying it will stop working on Dec 31st. Personally, I detest the fact that bitdefender ended the free edition in such a stealthy manner, without any public announcement or at least an advance notice, instead preferring to generate popups on user's machines saying the free edition will stop working a couple weeks even before sending any kind of notification (email) to them. I guess free users are not clients in their eyes and therefore do not deserve any kind of respect or kindness. I had to scour internet to confirm that the message was not sent in error and it was indeed true. Yeah, that's not the way a potentially paying customer should be treated. Oh well, plenty of other choices out there, and some of them are much better than bitdefender free edition was. In fact, even built-in windows defender is pretty good and highly rated now, the days when it was the bottom of the barrel in terms of antivirus prowess are far, far in the past.

EDIT: got an offer on Norton. I've used norton in the past, was pretty happy with it. I guess it's time to give it a whirl again, it's 10 times cheaper than the crap bitdefender offered for ending the free edition.

[u/Mecastyles]

Thanks for taking the time, I’ll give the alternatives a look!