How can some companies provide Anti-virus/adware/spyware protection for free while others (like Norton) charge

Question

...quite a large fee? How do they make a profit? I can't believe that they're doing it out of the kindness of their hearts.

Answer 1

Many free one for example, Superantispyware free edition, is a crippleware. Meaning that many features are disable unless you pay.

However, some free one like spybot and clamwin depend on donation.

Answer 2

1) paid means more features/more advance

e.g if you take avg free 8.0 V/S norton 360 2.0 which is paid.

there are huge diffrences in too.

in simple words its the price diffrce betweek 2star hotel and 5star hotel.

Answer 3

Well the free ones are very cut down. You genrally wont find the very top ones giving you free Like kaspersky or eset. Also people who like free ones may go on to buying the full package. They may also scare you by saying that you are not fully protected with the free version and to upgrade to AVG internet security.

Answer 4

They make money from the advertisers. If you notice that when you go to the free ones, you'll see ads on that page. The company that own the ads have to pay to advertise their product.

Answer 5

Many, but not all, of the free versions have less functionality.  The virus definitions are the same in both the free version and the paid version.  For many vendors, they hope that you will upgrade to the paid version.

Example from Avast and AVG Free v. Paid:

http://www.avast.com/eng/avast-compare-h...

http://free.avg.com/ww.download-avg-anti...

Answer 6

Using free anti virus means installing few vendor solutions ( anti virus , firewall , spam protection , spy ware protection and so on ) and most of free anti virus solutions doesn't offer real time protection and constantly reminds you to upgrade for full version ( so in certain way it's a demo version ) . On the other hand all large internet security vendors offer very large pack ( not only internet security suite but registry cleaner , backup solutions )

Answer 7

If those that comes for free screws your pc then you don;t have anyone to complain for. Thats the big difference, responsibility and proffessionalism.