uTorrent Ad-free comes with a $4.95 per year tag

The makers of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent revealed uTorrent Ad-Free yesterday, an advertisement free version for $4.95 per year.

The program has been available in two different versions up until now: a free, advertisement driven version, and a Pro version which adds add-on features to the client that are not linked directly to the downloading or seeding of torrent files, but to processing these files on the local system.

The company has been in hot water ever since it offered a Bitcoin miner via its advertising program which used resources of the PC to mine for Bitcoin in the background, often without the user noticing that this was happening.

BitTorrent Inc promised then that it would move away from the bundled software monetization model, and that it started to explore other monetization options.

uTorrent Ad-free

The new uTorrent Ad-Free plan is the result of that. There is still a free version of uTorrent available for users who don't want to pay, but it appears to ship with OpenCandy, a platform that monetizes software installations.

Windows users may get third-party offers that are unrelated to uTorrent when they install the program on their system.

The new uTorrent Ad-free version is offered for a subscription fee of $4.95 per year. It is a limited version of uTorrent Pro, as it shares the ad-free nature of the Pro version but does not come with the additional processing options of the Pro version.

For our latest development, we’re happy to introduce Ad-Free μTorrent for $4.95 USD annual subscription. This gives users the option of avoiding any and all ads in the client. It’s exciting to us because it gives users the ability to avoid advertising at 25% of the cost that it used to be – about 5 dollars a year instead of 20 dollars.

Free users of the program can subscribe to the new Ad-free version of uTorrent in two ways:

1. Select Options > Get uTorrent Pro in the client. This opens upgrade options in uTorrent allowing you to pick Ad-free or Pro there directly.
2. Open this page on the official uTorrent website instead. There you can get uTorrent Ad-free and uTorrent Pro directly without installing the free client first.

Remove ads

It is interesting to note that free users can remove the ads in the client without upgrading to the two new paid versions of uTorrent.

We described how this is done back in 2012, and the method works equally fine as of today.

1. Select Options > Preferences while uTorrent is open.
2. Click on Advanced.
3. Search for "offers" using the Filter function.
4. Locate offers.left_rail_offer_enabled, and set it to false (double-click on it).
5. Locate offers_sponsored_torrent_offer_enabled, and set it to false.

Closing Words

Subscriptions seem to be the way to go in the software world these days. While they provide companies with a constant revenue stream, it is likely that the prospect of making annual payments to a company for use of a service or software does not appeal to all Internet users.

Those who want to support the makers of uTorrent, or any other program they use regularly, may prefer to make a one-time payment instead which is not supported right now.

They could in theory upgrade to uTorrent Ad-free for a year, and cancel their subscription afterwards.

Another thing to remember is that there are several BitTorrent clients out there that are equally good or maybe even better that don't cost any money.

Now You: Would you pay for an ad-free version to support the developers?