Why I built Vukalink this way
A new remote support program has to answer one question: why should it exist? Here are the four decisions I would defend.
By Howell Asava, Developer, Vukalink ยท
The obvious question about a new remote support program is why it should exist. Good ones are already on the market, some of them twenty years old. I do not think the answer is a longer feature list. It is a small number of decisions about who the program is for, and I want to set them out plainly, because they are the reason Vukalink looks the way it does.
The person being helped is the customer too
Most support tools are designed for the technician, who pays, and tolerated by the person at the other end, who does not. I think that is backwards. The person whose screen is being shared is taking the larger risk, so they get the clearest view: who is connected, what that person is allowed to do, and one button that ends it. If I had to keep only one part of Vukalink, it would be that red banner.
Nobody should be locked out by a guess
I chose the limits of the Free version myself: 90 minutes of sessions and then a 30-minute break, files up to 1 GB, two unattended computers. They are numbers, the same for everybody. The program never tries to work out whether you are a business, and it never cuts a session because it suspects you are. A tool people rely on has to behave predictably.
Payment should fit the customer
Vukalink is built in Kenya, where business is paid for by phone. So it has prices in shillings, an M-Pesa till, and the choice of paying by the month. None of that is unusual here. It is only unusual in software.
Say what is true today
The installer is not code-signed yet, so Windows warns about it. There is no Mac, Linux or phone version yet. M-Pesa payments are confirmed by us while the automatic Daraja integration with Safaricom is pending. All of this is written on the website, on the same pages as the good news.
That is a deliberate choice. Remote access asks for more trust than almost any other kind of software, and I would sooner lose a sale to an honest sentence than win one with a hopeful one.
What I am asking of you
Use it for the 60 days, on real work. Then tell me what failed and what you missed. My address is on the contact page, and I read what arrives.