Back in 2014, I discovered Miradore, an ITSM solution with a then-emerging Mobile Device Management (MDM) product that promised a robust set of features for managing Android devices. My initial review, Miradore Online: Free MDM, highlighted the platform's potential and its generous free tier, which made it stand out in a market otherwise dominated by costly alternatives.
Miradore isn't defined by their free tier, of course, there's a rather large and feature-rich product behind it. It's what drew me in to their product in the first place however, and has been a consistent, defining feature of their platform for more than a decade.
Over the years, I revisited Miradore multiple times, documenting its growth and the expansion of its feature set in articles like Miradore Online MDM Review: A Second Look and Miradore Online MDM: Expanding Management with Subscriptions.
In 2022, when Miradore announced its acquisition by Goto, I met the news with cautious optimism. Goto, a company known for its suite of remote work tools, seemed like a reasonably safe choice to nurture Miradore's growth. Official announcements from both parties, such as Goto Acquires Miradore and Miradore Acquired by Goto: What Happens Next?, painted a rosy picture of enhanced resources and expanded capabilities.
However, the honeymoon period is certainly over now. Since the acquisition, Goto has more and more shown its disdain for Miradore's core MDM USP, systematically stripping away key features from the free tier and fundamentally altering the product's value proposition and accessibility.
Last December, a significant change came when Goto removed essential functionalities from the free plan. Email configuration, VPN setup, Wi-Fi settings, contacts management, and mail were no longer accessible without a paid subscription. Details of these changes weren't outlined in Miradore's release notes, instead opting to send direct emails to certain customers only. I personally heard about it second-hand. Nevertheless, the impact was felt by long-time users who had integrated these features into their device management workflows.
The situation worsened then in April; Goto further restricted the free tier by limiting mass actions — a cornerstone feature for any MDM solution. According to the official announcement:
We have modified our Free plan and limited the mass actions. From now on, Free plan customers can:
- Deploy configuration profiles one device at a time
- Synchronize a single device at a time
These changes effectively crippled the efficiency that Miradore once offered. Administrators now have to perform repetitive tasks individually for each device, a tedious process that is impractical for organisations managing more than a handful of devices.
But Goto isn't finished. Later this year, they have announced plans to cap the number of devices on the free plan to 50, down from unlimited. The forthcoming changes were communicated through another release note recently.
Yes, effectively unlimited devices down to 50. They aren't adjusting the tier functionality either, so it remains quite limited in capability after this change also.
Obviously paying customers on higher tiers are wholly unaffected by these changes, and the remaining Miradore team within Goto continue to do a wonderful job with their customer base.
That said, many of the paying customers they have will have come in through their free tier, often selected because organisations could get started and grow their estates without a licence commitment. These cumulative changes have made Miradore's free tier not just limited but virtually unusable for organisations of any moderate size and/or complexity, and pit Miradore far more directly with competing platforms, such as Manage Engine's 25 free licences. Fewer, yes, but not feature-limited.
If you're going to enforce limits, you'd be wise typically to pick a path - limited licences, or limited functionality. The removal of both critical features and the imposition of device limits is a double-whammy that offers the worst of both worlds. I'd ask how they expect groups on the free tier to remain loyal to a platform driven by decisions that scream "we don't want you here", but it seems apparent they haven't considered the question.
As someone who has championed Miradore for nearly a decade, I find this trajectory disheartening. The platform's Unique Selling Proposition (USP) was its robust free tier, which allowed organisations — especially smaller groups and communities with tight budgets — to manage their Android devices effectively without incurring additional costs, and I have directed hobbyists, charities, and indeed potential customers their way for years to benefit from this in order to take a first step into the enterprise management ecosystem.
Goto's strategy appears to be undermining this USP entirely. By going down the path they've chosen, they're alienating the very user base that helped Miradore grow. It's a puzzling move, especially when considering that the MDM market is more competitive than ever, and my sympathies go out to the remaining Miradore team suffering the consequences of these mandates.
Miradore's journey from a promising entry point into device management to its current state of limited functionality on a finite number of devices is a cautionary tale of how acquisitions can sometimes erode the very qualities that gave a product its place in a market. Goto's incremental worsening of their product will fundamentally change what Miradore offers, making it less appealing to organisations that may have used it as a jumping point into a higher tier at a later date, and more likely to be bundled with competing platforms in the decision-making process, unfortunately some with more compelling trial / free tiers than Miradore will soon offer.
My hope going forward is these changes derive very real, measurable impacts on user acquisition and retention, and force Goto to revert. Better still if they also then choose to step back and let the folks who built and know the product define how it should be positioned and operated in the market going forward.