i know many iphone users and most of them hate paying for apps. most forum owners receive donations, use ads, or do subscriptions. 80 bucks isn't much to pay out of that pot of money. peeps flock to free apps, while alot of these same peeps shy away from paid apps. i think having he app free will help increase membership for our forums.

aye have you joined the support forum?

I shy away from $5 apps but 0.99 or 1.99 for a decent app I'd be willing to pay for. I wouldn't mind if it was a $20 yearly fee on the server side and then $1.99 for the app on the app store.

Just what I thought on page one..... using all of the members here to help develop this app so he can try and take advantage of the site owners with 80 per year lmao vb itself is not that expensive WTF are you thinking? lol

this is a big FAIL! until it's free for the server app and 2 bucks or less for the iphone app, that is if it ever get's approved...... they are only approving 3.0 version moving forward, so I hope you did your homework and made this work on 3.0? otherwise you have wasted your time as they will not approve it.

Told ya so........... lmao I knew I smelled something stinky.... lol

100% agree,

Disagree. I honestly think to make this a sustainable service (that's the key word here), an $80 yearly fee is not absurd at all.

Before you go and hit the quick reply button, hear me out. Let's say this see's some serious adoption by vB forum owners and YellowCoder/Winter has to add more servers to keep the service up and running smoothly. That's an expense that has to come out of the fee's for the software and we haven't even talked about hosting/bandwidth expenses (assuming a co-lo setup).

Also, when you talk about an iPhone app, keep in mind that Apple takes their cut off the top too! Those 100 installs at $2.99 doesn't exactly translate into $299 profit. More like $200. (apple takes 30%, + $100 a year for developers)

That's also assuming your top 2.8% of your 3500 members, 1) have an iPhone, 2) would by a $3 app for your site.

That's a big IF.

I'm a serious vB forum owner. I own several forums with around 14,000 total members and I take them all very serious. This is not a hobby for me.

I won't pay $80 a year each for my sites. The server side needs to be free or most vb owners won't get on board.

In order for this to be successful, its implementation on the server side needs to be wide spread throughout the vb community. With a yearly fee it won’t be. Doesn’t matter if the app is free, if there’s limited sites that participate on the server side the app is useless. I realize it’s early in the game but none of the sites I regularly visit are in the list and I doubt they will be anytime soon.. maybe never, so therefore the app is useless to me. If the server side was free you would have way more forum owners jumping on board and promoting it to their users which translates into app sales.

I've got to disagree with that thought process. In order to create a sustainable service, you have to have a business model that is built on continuous growth. The list of sites that will use this service will top out pretty quickly (esp at $80/year). However, the number of users on these sites will continue to grow exponentially.

I've got probably 500 users on my site who would purchase this app immediately for $2. That's over 12 years worth of $80 fees for me to use the software.

Think it through.

Take it to the next level. I too have a % of members who would for sure buy the app for two bucks. But as a forum owner I’m not going to pay for the service so no one on my sites most likely are going to buy the app nor am I going to market the app to my users.

The chances are pretty high that none of the other forums my members go to including myself are going to ever be on the list. Most forum members don’t randomly surf community sites. They are members of specific sites and only those sites. The chances of those sites being on the list are slim to none given the vast number of forums large and small that are out there. Thus the app is totally worthless.

If it’s free for the forum owners, you have many more that will jump on-board and in fact market it as a feature of the site. Again, if it’s free for the forum owner they will add it as a cool new feature and promote it to their members translating into not only more app sales but most assuredly a broader range of forums available.

I’m a regular member of probably twenty sites but I’d be willing to bet not one of them will pay for the service if I requested it. If it was free I’d be willing to bet most would gladly provide it for their members which again translates into more app sales.

There is no way this program will ever succeed unless it has wide spread application in the vb community and most forum owners simply won’t pay for it. Thus it renders the application almost useless unless the specific forums you visit are on the list which is unlikey.

You can put me down as another forum owner who is not interested in paying $80 a year for this. I hope the developer reconsiders otherwise a lot of hard work will be for nothing IMO. Besides, wouldn't it be better to charge for the app? I would happily pay $5-10 for this app on the app store. Registered forum users would outnumber actually forums quite substantially I would think?