The site, which claims to be independent, is the equivalent of the business and car insurance comparison portals, Infosecurity notes, but with the added twist that almost all IT security vendors offer 'teaser' deals – typically offering half-price for a year's subscription – to get new customers to install and register their software.
Commenting on the arrival of the site, security researcher Brian Krebs says that the anti-virus industry has long drawn its biggest share of profits from loyal customers, extracting full-price for the software from existing customers seeking license renewals while steeply discounting their products for new users.
"For example, I have Norton Internet Security installed on one of my Windows 7 machines; I selected that product from the pull-down menu, told it I wanted a 3-user license, and instantly saw an offer for NIS 2011 for $29.99. Had I simply waited until the product was about to expire and followed the prompt from the currently-installed software to renew my license, that renewal would have cost me $62.99, according to Symantec's site", says Krebs.
"True, you can find these deals on your own just by spending a few minutes searching the Web (the $29.99 link offered by this service brought me to an offer on Amazon.com). But my sense is that very few people who pay for anti-virus software ever do this", he adds.
Krebs quotes Graham O'Reilly, the CEO of Renewalbuddy.com and former sales director of AVG UK, as saying that people assume that a renewal license key is somehow different from a new license key.
This is why, he told the security researcher, most people click on the expiration pop-up and go through the process – and then end up paying full price for their renewals.
"What people don't understand is that a license key is a license key, and that they can just pop it in to the program without having to reinstall it, and it will extend a license in the same way", Krebs quotes him as saying in his latest security blog.
So where does this leave the free AV packages?
As Krebs observes: "Readers often ask about the difference between free and paid anti-virus. The differences depend on the products youre comparing, but by and large the freebies have fewer bells and whistles, and usually don't offer customer support."
"Also, recent comparisons by anti-virus testing lab AV-Test.org showed that paid anti-virus products tend to perform slightly better in detecting malicious software."