Ad Muncher free released

[niks2456]

http://www.admuncher.com/download

 

 

Ad Muncher, I launched you 15 years ago, and since day one I've felt slightly uneasy for charging people for the faster, safer and more pleasant browsing experience you provide.

Anybody that knows me knows that I apologize a little too much, but I honestly felt the need to apologize to every single user for making them pay their hard-earned $29.95.

Charging this way though has allowed me to fund development myself, and I never needed investment or other revenue sources that could interfere with my goal of an influence-free ad blocker.

But now, with the financial support provided by over 100,000 people, I've decided it's finally time for you to be let free.

What?

Ad Muncher is normally available for $29.95, plus $19.95 per year after that, but will now be available in the same form as a completely free product.

All users will receive filter list updates. Weekly to begin with, then daily if our hosting can handle the load.

Seriously?

Yes, nothing has been changed, we're just moving to much higher capacity hosting, and removing all the anti-piracy rubbish we needed previously.

How?

This will be financially difficult for me. Salaries for three people, along with our usual expenses, will be covered entirely by myself by selling almost everything I have, and taking on some external work.

At some point in the future, I may need to offer complimentary software products to Ad Muncher users (for example, a recommended spyware blocker or antivirus). These will be done respectfully, and will only be products that compliment Ad Muncher and which I genuinely use myself.

I will never, ever accept payments from an advertising company to allow their ads through our list, or install any third-party software on your system.

I've previously turned down offers to make significant money from both of these sources, but I need to sleep at night, and users of Ad Muncher deserve to be treated right after all the support they've given me.

I just paid damn it!

I completely understand how you would be feeling if you recently purchased Ad Muncher, only to see this announcement.

Ad Muncher wouldn't be here without your support. You saw a struggling software product and paid your hard-earned cash to help keep it alive. Your support is appreciated, and will never be forgotten.

My only request at this point is that you understand the difficult position this transition will place me in financially, and accept my goal of giving you no less in terms of service than if Ad Muncher wasn't free.

We have a 30-day full refund policy that I'm happy to still provide, but every refund will reduce the chances of Ad Muncher surviving as a free product.

What about version 5?

Work will continue on our new cross-platform filtering solution. We're six years into the development and as committed as ever to bringing this to market.

Hmmm, ok then

Ad Muncher, you'll never make me rich, and I've made a net loss running you for the last two years, but I just don't care.

You've made a lot of people happy, you've let me do what I love for a living, and I'm honestly just looking forward to seeing you making browsing faster, safer and more pleasant for a larger number of people.

 

 

http://www.admuncher.com/download

[ThaCrip]

i was just about to post this as i been using AD-Muncher for years (probably 10+) as it's the gold standard for blocking ads in my book.

 

it's only flaw is that it does not filter https currently so for youtube you still kind of need adblock-plus installed but other than that it's great and works on all browsers.

[niks2456]

Ha ! Not working for me in IE 11 Win 7 x64 . Can anybody confirm ? Works for Firefox 33 , Palemoon 25 , Chrome 38 x64 , Opera 25 .

[Luc2k]

Ha ! Not working for me in IE 11 Win 7 x64 . Can anybody confirm ? Works for Firefox 33 , Palemoon 25 , Chrome 38 x64 , Opera 25 .

It never supported IE11.

[streetw0lf]

Adguard much better and supported.  Must pay for it though.

[+Warwagon MVC]

It has ALWAYS drove me nuts they charged $20 per machine. I would have been giving them $20 for years. But not if I couldn't use it on all my machines. It's great now that's its free. It really is the best

[Alwaysonacoffebreak]

It has ALWAYS drove me nuts they charged $20 per machine. I would have been giving them $20 for years. But not if I couldn't use it on all my machines. It's great now that's its free. It really is the best

 

You did see the part where he said he had to pay 3 salaries right? Money doesn't grow on trees you know.

[Ishanx]

Is this better than uBlock?

[+Warwagon MVC]

You did see the part where he said he had to pay 3 salaries right? Money doesn't grow on trees you know.

 

VERY true. But instead they got zero money from me instead of $20 ..err I take that back. they got $20 out of me once, but just once. They could have had it every year for the last 5 years.

[blank]

Been paying for adblocker for years. Never heard of Adguard, will look into it.

 

I was a bit weary because they announced months ago that ad muncher was going free, and yesterday i got the email that my license was about to expire and needed to be renewed. I didn't want to renew if it was going to be free soon.

A few hours later i got the AD MUNCHER IS FREE! email, along with links.

 

I wasn't going to renew my license anyways. For the past year Ad Muncher connectivity and support has been horrible.

Nearly impossible to connect to the update server, 95% of the time it fails. Just very annoying.

 

Complained about it last march here

http://forum.admuncher.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=29421

 

It's obvious the guy doesn't care about the program anymore. He keeps mentioning BS about selling all his personal items in order to support ad muncher, etc blah blah.

And the next version of ad muncher (been in the works for years and years), will be hosted  with amazon servers, so people will actually be able to connect.

 

i read a while back that the guy who created Ad muncher, Murray Hurps, got a decent job with Google (or something like that), so maybe he had to make Ad Muncher free, or let it go, or so since Google is an Ad company.

http://www.brw.com.au/p/entrepreneurs/tenant_turns_top_dog_at_fishburners_aY5v7JoOZEViFHV499RzKN

[Eric Veteran]

Is this better than uBlock?

 

I'm guessing yes since ?Block is only for Chrome.

[Ironman273]

I was a paying Admuncher user for years but then the updates stopped coming and it seemed like the project was dead. I switched over to Adguard and have been very happy with it.

[ThaCrip]

I was a paying Admuncher user for years but then the updates stopped coming and it seemed like the project was dead. I switched over to Adguard and have been very happy with it.

 

there are updates to the filters a fair amount just not much as far as the program itself. but now that AD-Muncher is free i can't see Adguard being better at this point even if it is a bit better in functionality etc as i would imagine Adguard's main advantage is https filtering which is the only reason i am forced to keep Adblock plus extension installed which is a shame since that's a bit resource hungry as it burns up a decent chunk of RAM when it's enabled vs disabled but being it's the only way i can filter youtube ads i kind of got to deal with it.

 

in my experience AD-Muncher just works without interfering with web browsing and i probably had it installed for a good 10+ years and had very little issues with it.

[insanelyapple]

i read a while back that the guy who created Ad muncher, Murray Hurps, got a decent job with Google (or something like that), so maybe he had to make Ad Muncher free, or let it go, or so since Google is an Ad company.

http://www.brw.com.au/p/entrepreneurs/tenant_turns_top_dog_at_fishburners_aY5v7JoOZEViFHV499RzKN

So there may be a possibility that free version won't block Google ad platform.

I assume it uses own blocking list format and doesn't support i.e. Adblock ones?

[niks2456]

So there may be a possibility that free version won't block Google ad platform.

I assume it uses own blocking list format and doesn't support i.e. Adblock ones?

 

Yes . Custom filters . Not Easylist or Fanboy .

[Boo Berry]

there are updates to the filters a fair amount just not much as far as the program itself. but now that AD-Muncher is free i can't see Adguard being better at this point even if it is a bit better in functionality etc as i would imagine Adguard's main advantage is https filtering which is the only reason i am forced to keep Adblock plus extension installed which is a shame since that's a bit resource hungry as it burns up a decent chunk of RAM when it's enabled vs disabled but being it's the only way i can filter youtube ads i kind of got to deal with it.

Adguard can also do userscripts in all browsers in addition to other things like Metro IE and soon any application (including any Metro apps). Plus there's the Android version, the inbound Mac and iOS versions and the browser extensions which have lower resource usage than Adblock Plus, which you should look into too since you have an issue with that. ;) Regarding the announcement my response is meh. I don't see it ending good for Murray in the long run - the financial risk he's taking seems too much of a gamble to be worth it in the end.