As owner and main author of the software distribution and inventory tool ABC-Deploy I found that I needed a freeware tool to let my product pull patches from WSUS or MS Update.
I had some specific demands for the tool I was looking for, like ability to define max reboots, and filtering options for at least patch dates, KB Articles and update categories. Windows 10 support of cause also.
And the tool had to be freeware because I wanted to redistribute to my customers who use ABC-Deploy for general software distribution and patching of 3. party software not available from MS Update. Adding MS patching capabilities to ABC-Deploy was a natural step.
So I went looking, thinking that someone would have made a useful tool available, since I assumed that it is something most administrators of Windows networks really need.
But the candidates was either of inadequate quality, or they carried a price tag that was way too high. So I decided that I would have to do the coding myself.
Not too hard to do, because the MS Update process is very well documented, and MS have made it possible to call from .NET languages. The benefits are that I get exactly what I want, in a quality that I can vouch for.
And after discovering that the market is missing a free and high quality tool to pull updates, it was an easy decision to deliver this tool as freeware.
I hope that the traffic and attention about a high quality free product that many admins needs draw some attention to my commercial product ABC-Deploy. And I hope to get a lot of feedback from users of the tool to ensure that the quality continues to be unmatched. In this way I believe that I can deliver the best tool to my ABC-Deploy customers.