WELL. As it turns out, Retopoflow is OSS! They release the add on for FREE on github here: https://github.com/CGCookie/retopoflow

I do really need to stress to you that this is not for commercial purposes. If you're making money off this, and if it's feasible for you, you should do the right thing and pay the developers (plus that's what you'll have to do if you need support!)

Now for something a bit more up to date. 

Working on my quadruped tutorial and my Umbreon model, which may make an appearance in the tutorial; probably should since the 3rd umbreon model was the focus of the original rigging tutorial. 

But for now Retopoflow:

I think at this point I am comfortable with the program that I can get some serious work done on these models. Been going back and forth but also plagued by the fact that once you start retopoflow, you cannot stop, and while it seriously decreases the retopology time, for someone like me that’s new to it I can’t get these done during the weekdays after work.... Or could I?

Last night I was doing the retopology on my quadruped (Still haven’t named the rat-like creature yet) had the head mostly retopologized, minus the nose and decided to call it a night.

 I opened up the file today, and knowing that retopoflow would crash if I tried to use the current mesh, I decided I would create a ring around the neck with the exact number of verticies as the end of the head retopology. The idea was to join the two or three or however many additions I made in the end. But instead of that I used the hotkey to join the objects in object mode. The result was exactly what I was looking for. 

a bit story about retopology, lol

just keep scrolling (or swiping) if you’re not really interested with this kind of stuff

so I found these things called Contours and Polystrips which are retopology tools for Blender

I really want to use those things, so I decided to give them a try, but I feel a bit dissapointed because they feel kinda incomplete

then I found out that they’re actually being combined to be Retopoflow with new features (that I really need), which is great but until now, the developers never released anything and I can’t find any update of it

it took me a day until I decided to use Topogun which is apparently very very good