"Hey, F-Secure!" "YOU SUCK!"
...OK, that might be putting it a bit strongly. F-Secure still keeps winning the overall-best-antivirus awards each year.
The trouble is you can't buy JUST #FSecure #antivirus any more. They're discontinuing that product.
The WORSE problem is that F-Secure tries to push you to their 'Total' bundle product as "the replacement" for antivirus-only.
Now, right now, I'm buying six antivirus seats for $70 a year. Yes, I'm aware I could get Avast! or AVG for free. But they both suck. I used to use AVG, and had to abandon it because it became an unmanageable CPU hog. I used to use Avast!, but had to abandon it because they stuffed it full of bloatware. And F-Secure had better protection anyway. (And at that point there were no good free antivirus products left.)
The "this is your upgrade route" that F-Secure pushes, their Total product, is the freaking #kitchen #sink. EVERYTHING is in there. VPN. Password manager. Automated nose hair removal. AI remote dog walking for all I know. (But I don't have an AI dog so I don't care about that.) It LOOKS like a good deal at first — ten seats for two years for $84? Sign me up!
Until you go to the actual order form. And then you see that at your first renewal, the price jumps to $240.
No. Fuck off.
It actually turns out, with a bit of hunting around, that I can get their Internet Security product (which is antivirus, the only thing of theirs I actually want, with only a few things I don't want bundled with it), for seven seats for two years at a time for the same I'm paying for six seats now (and a 35% discount for the first two years).
But I'd sooner NOT HAVE all the extra shit even in that product. The most valuable product to me that you have is your antivirus. I don't care about parental protection, I don't care about someone else's idea of how much screen time is right for my family, my banking connections are already encrypted, I already have unsafe-site protections in place. I just want virus detection. And trying to push me into the maximum-bloat hog-wallow as a "renewal", with a 70%-reduction first-year bait-and-switch is just slimy.
#FSecure, please do not succumb to enshittification. You're already pretty much the de-facto market leader. Be satisfied with that. Keep selling the products people want, and stop trying to trick them into buying a flaming bag of dog turds that they don't. You need to fire whatever marketing manager came up with this despicable, deceptive upselling scam.