Solo admin, MSP technician, three-person helpdesk, or the family IT department every holiday — the session starts the same way. The person you are helping reads you a 4-digit one-time PIN, and you are on their screen with full control, file transfer, and audio. No accounts on either side. No per-technician fees. Free for commercial support work.
Commercial remote support tools price by the technician seat. TeamViewer licenses start at $24.90 per month and AnyDesk Solo at $14.90 per month — per technician, whether that seat clears two hundred tickets a week or remotes into a client server twice a month. The free editions of those tools are for personal use only: they run commercial-use detection, and when the heuristics fire they interrupt or cut the session mid-fix.
Attended support is billed like enterprise software even when the helpdesk is one person. Every technician who might take a session needs a paid seat, and the invoice scales with headcount rather than with the work. See the full breakdowns in our TeamViewer and AnyDesk comparisons.
The mainstream free editions exist for personal use and enforce it with detection heuristics. Help a client from the same machine you use for invoicing and the session gets flagged, time-limited, or dropped — usually in the middle of the one fix that mattered that day.
Every mainstream support tool requires accounts and assigns each install a permanent address in a central ID directory. Scammers exploit exactly that — the classic tech-support scam is talking a victim into installing the tool and reading out their ID. The directories and credential stores themselves are targets too: both TeamViewer and AnyDesk disclosed security incidents in 2024.
Three steps between "my computer is broken" and your cursor on their screen. The same flow works for a client across the country and for your dad across town.
Mac or Windows — including Windows Home, the edition most home and small-office machines actually run and the one Microsoft's built-in Remote Desktop host does not cover (see remote desktop on Windows 11 Home). One download from remio.net/download, no signup form, no email verification standing between you and the fix.
The host shows a 4-digit one-time PIN, and the pairing request expires in 60 seconds. The user reads it to you over the phone or pastes it into chat. A PIN scribbled on a sticky note is useless minutes later, and there is no permanent ID for a scammer to harvest in a follow-up call.
The technician side runs on Mac, Windows, iPhone, iPad, and Android — take the session from the workshop PC or from your phone in a parking lot. You get full keyboard and mouse control, built-in file transfer to push a driver or installer, and audio forwarding, so when the user says "it makes a weird chime," you hear the chime.
The session itself runs peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted with AES-256-GCM. Remio's servers broker the introduction and never see the stream — the screen you are looking at travels directly between the two machines.
Support tools are a favorite instrument of fraud precisely because of how they are built: a central directory where every install has a durable, dialable address. Remio removes the directory instead of bolting warnings onto it.
There is no AnyDesk-style ID a scammer can ask a victim to read out, because Remio installs have no permanent address in any central directory. A connection exists only when someone at the host approves a pairing — there is no number that reaches the machine from outside.
The current 4-digit one-time PIN is displayed on the host's screen and has to be read by someone physically at the machine — and the pairing request expires in 60 seconds. Access is granted by presence, not by an identity that can be phished from anywhere on the internet.
No accounts means no password database, no email list, and no session directory sitting on a vendor's servers waiting to be dumped. Keys are generated on the endpoints and never leave them. The breach scenario that hit centralized remote-access vendors in 2024 has no Remio equivalent, because the data set does not exist.
Previously paired machines can be reached without anyone present only after explicit opt-in on the host machine itself — a deliberate setting flipped at the keyboard, never a default. Until then, every session starts with a fresh PIN read by a person who is actually there.
Everything. Remio is completely free — every feature, on every platform, for commercial support work as much as for family rescue calls. There is no feature matrix to study, because there is only one column.
Reach the office server or a recurring client's front-desk PC without anyone at the keyboard, after explicit opt-in on that host. Off by default, enabled per machine.
Wake a sleeping desktop on the network before the session, fix what needs fixing, and let it go back to sleep. Setup guide at Wake-on-LAN.
See every display on the remote machine and switch between them — the error dialog is always on the monitor the user forgot they had.
Crisp text at the host's native resolution, so a registry path or a terminal command is readable instead of guessable.
Push installers and driver packages, pull logs and diagnostics, and paste license keys straight across the session.
No session-time limits, no per-technician licensing, no commercial-use detection. The fix takes as long as the fix takes, and nobody bills you for being good at your job.
Remio is a superb attended-support and small-fleet tool today. It is not yet a fleet-management platform, and we would rather you know that now than discover it during a rollout.
For a 50-seat NOC running scheduled patch windows, scripted remediation across a fleet, and SLA reporting tied to tickets, a commercial RMM may still fit better today. Remio earns its place as the attended-session tool and the small-fleet workhorse — the one that costs nothing, needs no accounts, and never cuts a session.
If you are evaluating Remio for an organization, the enterprise page covers the zero-trust architecture story, deployment options, and how to contact us.
One install on your side, one sentence for theirs, and an optional pre-pairing pass over the machines you touch every month.
Grab Remio from the download page for your Mac, your Windows laptop, and your phone. The client is the technician side — having it on the phone means the Saturday-morning rescue call does not require finding a laptop first.
Save this sentence in your notes app and paste it into every "my computer is broken" thread: "Download Remio from remio.net/download, open it, read me the code." That is the entire end-user onboarding — no account creation step for them to get stuck on.
For the office server, the front-desk PC, and the family desktop, pair once, enable unattended access on the host while you are there, and set up Wake-on-LAN so a sleeping machine is reachable too. Next time, you connect without making anyone walk to the keyboard.
The full walkthrough — install, first pairing, permissions prompts on macOS and Windows — lives in the getting-started guide.
Yes — completely free, every feature, on every platform, for personal and commercial use alike. There is no commercial-use detection, no watchdog deciding that your session with a client counts as business, and no per-technician license to buy. Supporting paying customers with Remio costs nothing.
No — neither side of a Remio session has an account, and there is nothing to sign up for. The person being helped installs the Remio host and reads a 4-digit one-time PIN to the technician; the pairing request expires in 60 seconds. No email address, no password, and no identity directory are involved on either end.
Yes. Once a machine has been paired, unattended access can be enabled — it is off by default and requires explicit opt-in on the host machine itself. Combined with Wake-on-LAN, a technician can wake a sleeping desktop on the office network and handle after-hours maintenance without anyone at the keyboard.
Remio has built-in file transfer in both directions. Push a driver package, an installer, or a log-collection script to the remote machine during the session, and pull diagnostic files back the same way. Clipboard sync carries the small things — license keys, registry paths, terminal commands — without a separate transfer step.
Remio hosts run on macOS 15 or later and on Windows 10 (build 19041 or later) and Windows 11, including Windows Home editions. Clients run on iOS and iPadOS 18 or later, macOS 15 or later, Android 10 or later, Windows 10 and 11. On Apple Vision Pro, the iPad app runs today. A technician with an iPhone has full control of a Mac or Windows host, with file transfer and audio included.
Install the client on your devices today, keep the one-line instruction ready, and the next support call starts with a 4-digit PIN instead of a licensing decision. Free for commercial support work — every feature, every platform.