Bitdefender pulls the plug on its free antivirus solution

I’ve used many different antivirus programs over the years, but these days I swear by the excellent Bitdefender Total Security. Not everyone wants to pay for protection of course, which is why free solutions prove so popular.

Bitdefender’s no-cost offering -- Antivirus Free Edition for Windows -- is a great choice, or rather I should say 'was' a great choice, as the company is set to retire it by the end of the year.

A message on the page for the software simply states:

We are focusing product development around multi-platform protection and as a result, we are retiring Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition for Windows. Current users will be supported through June 30, 2022.

Users of the free software also received an email which covered the end of the free solution in more depth.

The decision to discontinue a product is never easy.

This is especially so when a product is as popular as our Free Edition product has been for the last years.

Since early 2020, we have had to weather immense changes in our industry, changes which upended many of our cherished plans for product development.

Sadly, Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition has been a casualty of those changes.

As of 1st of January 2022, Bitdefender Antivirus Free Edition will officially be discontinued and no longer available for use.

As a Free Edition user, how does this affect you, and how should you prepare?

We will continue to offer tech support for our Free Edition until 30st of June 2022. We hope this gives you time to choose and install an alternative solution that will keep your devices protected.

As cybersecurity experts, we strongly advise you not to simply leave your PC unprotected going forward. Malware attacks are more sophisticated than ever, so it is critical to have robust protection that keeps you and your devices safe at all times.

If you would like to keep Bitdefender's silent "set-it-and-forget-it" style of protection (and we hope you do), we will happily upgrade your subscription to our most popular protection plan, Bitdefender Total Security, for a nominal fee of just $9.98 for the entire first year.

Photo Credit: kurhan/Shutterstock