I was just wondering.

The answer is simple. It's not. :)

"Expensive" is a term that is relative to your budget. ;)

vB is far from expensive when you consider the number of people working on (developing and supporting) vBulletin.

Compare to other packages (UBB, UBBThreads etc) and you'll see that its the cheapest (and best) forum out there :)

apart from the free ones ;)

Yah...I guess it is relative to my budget... :P How much does those other boards cost? I mean I know VBB IS the best ;)

Well:

UBB is $199, and members area access renewals are $99/year (compared to $30/year for vB)

UBBThreads is $229, and members area access renewals are $125/yr

OpenTopic costs an absolute fortune (depending on the size of your board). Fees range from $299/month to $4999/month.

As you can see, vB is clearly the cheapest. It's the best as well ;)

Whoa.... :P Why do Bulletin Boards cost so much?

The only other board i maybe would prefer to vBulletin is WebCrossing (www.webcrossing.com). It's a very mighty product ... with his own database and so on. Great magazines like in Germany "Der Spiegel" and "Die Zeit" has them. I think the "New York Times" also.

But ... if you want to setup the software on your server you have to be an engineer (me and friends of mine tried a few times to install the demo ... but no way) and ...

They begin with $ 995,-

Yeah. It's the ... beginning. For someone with 5.000 pageviews in a month. Thats ... absolutely nothing.

But ... of course ... it's all a question of money ... you also can buy an unlimited licence.

For only ... $ 64.995 ... halleluya and hosiana, this piece of software has to be written by the lord himself. I hope.

For someone like me ... only $ 2.995 ... because until now we don't get more then 20k pageviews.

But ... of course it's only for the software. If you want support also ... just $ 395,- ... for the smallest version. If you buy the largest version ($ 64.000,-) you have to add $ 12.995,- for support and updates.

And ... in fact i know only one thing WebCrossing handles in a smarter way then vBulletin does ... it's the tracking of new and unread messages.

And i know at least 10 reasons to buy vBulletin instead of it.

One of the reasons ... is the low price.

Holy.....that is A LOT of money.....for a simple board....

I know i'm probibly going to a yabb board they are free and have loads of nice hacks and are easy to make your own

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Meta
..........For only ... $ 64.995 ... halleluya and hosiana, this piece of software has to be written by the lord himself. I hope..............

Well, I had no problem paying for it, only to have a problem when I wasted $90.53, and to use it for six-seven months of the whole year.

I must agree with these pickles, vB is well worth the money...

But **** like Open topic, is complete garbage...
I mean they serve a board on this peice of **** server, and...
It looks exactly like UBB...
I mean the least infopop could do is seperate the look of both there products...its ran on oracle or some bull****...
either way its garbage...

Be happy vB isnt overcharged like those boards..

[QUOTE]Originally posted by AnDy_LiN
Whoa.... :P Why do Bulletin Boards cost so much?

Ahh.....Now that you put it that way...... :P

Webcrossing, IMHO is an inferior product as well. Chatspace's Webboard (which I used to use, its terrible) is 2 grand.

Ethan

I gey my VB for free, no ads either.

But I am probably going to buy the licenced one, since there is millions of bugs. ;)

i heard the programmers are hired by jelsoft?

[QUOTE]Originally posted by ethank
Webcrossing, IMHO is an inferior product as well. Chatspace's Webboard (which I used to use, its terrible) is 2 grand.

Ethan

[QUOTE]Originally posted by XiXora
i heard the programmers are hired by jelsoft?

[QUOTE]Originally posted by XiXora
i heard the programmers are hired by jelsoft?

Vbulletin is worth every penny! A powerful, easy to use bbs packed with great features.. I could go on all night..

It is the key to the sucess of my website and anyway.. I recouped the initial cost of the licensce within a week or two by selling products which complimented the forums.. so Im not complaining!

The moment I saw the first VB board, I fell in love with it! Who said there is no such thing as love at first sight! :D

Bimma Boy

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Shadowz
its ran on oracle or some bull****...

how much does da liscense cost..199$ for VB right?

You guys talk as if 200$ is just nothing, its still a fare bit of money. I live in canada and that is $345.00 this is still expensive. Most of you are probbaly 30 years old lol.
VB is expensive, and so is all the other boards. Atleast YaBB and IkonBoard, and PhpBB understand, and give there product out for free. They will probably soon start charging money too, but little by little, there coming to be recognized as good BBS, Ikonboard is already one of the most used, and better ones.

HA, most of those enetertainment sites which use VB are all pirated.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by JamesUS


That is correct :) all developers and support staff have been hired by Jelsoft.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by DrkFusion
how much does da liscense cost..199$ for VB right?

Well you can write your own board in html and convert it to .php and use apache as a server(It's very secure) then get mysqladmin, so you can set up the .php manually. Well we are making our main page out of html mixed with newsphp, so far it looks ok. Go look http://www.gamersdistrict.orphus.com we are not finshed though, and testing the colors. I'm setting up the vb though. :D

[QUOTE]Originally posted by AnDy_LiN
I was just wondering.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by HELP
Im ghey for VB for free,

But I am going to buy the licenced one, because i dont want to get sued 100 times the price of the damn product ;)

[QUOTE]Originally posted by DrkFusion
how much does da liscense cost..199$ for VB right?

You guys talk as if 200$ is just nothing, its still a fare bit of money. I live in canada and that is $345.00 this is still expensive. Most of you are probbaly 30 years old lol.
VB is expensive, and so is all the other boards. Atleast YaBB and IkonBoard, and PhpBB understand, and give there product out for free. They will probably soon start charging money too, but little by little, there coming to be recognized as good BBS, Ikonboard is already one of the most used, and better ones.

HA, most of those enetertainment sites which use VB are all pirated.

There are a lot of boards out there and it's great to have so many choices. In the end it comes down to value and VB is still a great value. If you don't agree, you can always exercise one of the other choices. Great product!
:D

The thing with free BBS is, you will never (read my lips: never!) get the same support you get from companies you paid for. I don't think I even need to explain this obvious fact, do I? :)

WOW! I watched you say that and never even saw your lips move!
:)

Yeah, something the other boards don't have is the kind of participation and resources that are on VB.com and here. That's an awful lot of bang for your buck.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Stretchr
WOW! I watched you say that and never even saw your lips move!

Just complimenting you on another skill you've shown us. :D

Hello all what's the main difference between leased and owned license? Is there any drawback in purchasing a leased license for one year?

BTw what is the policy regarding changing color of the vBulletin copyright information posted below each message window? UBB has an option in the style setting where the moderator could set the color to match the background color so that it is not intrusive and allows webmasters to highlight their own copyright information.

Thanks in adv!

UBB:

Slow, Resource Hogging, Looks Not to many h4x ;), And its Only 200+ oh and i think thats for a ONE YEAR license


vB:

Fast MySQL Database, Lots of stuff to do with making it look MUCH nicer, Lots of h4x, 80 Bucks for a 1 year license, 160 to use it forever.

you can do whatever u want with ure money, but id go with vB over UBB any day.

Well after being a user of many of the free boards and UBB, I have to say vBulletin has paid off, even though I have not all the way figured out how I want it to look :) - I am working towards something nice and different.

As FireFly said, you will never get the support you get from a paid product over at one of the free boards websites. They may act like it but I do not feel that those working on the free boards care whether or not it is complete, popular, or if you have a problem installing it, after all, it is free, what all do you expect? They do work on the boards, but do you see too many changes that make a difference from version-to-version? I sure don't.

I will take iKonboard for instance, sure it hit it off with the incorportation of MySQL into the board, but the fact is, it is still CGI based and it is still slow and a resource hog (now more then ever, imo). Also, not that I want to get into a big argument over it, but more problems go on over at Jarvis/iKonboard than you know about, enough said.

Other boards such as phpBB and XMB are great boards to an extent, but they are a bit buggy. The last release of XMB that came out had a huge security leak in it to where you could get the database information (username, password, db-name, location, ect) right on the board just by entering a string into the URL. I believe it has been fixed, but it took about a month, who knows what happened during that time :).

Down to the ever pop...uhh....UBB :) - Sure, it (at some times) can look nice, but at what cost? Even more stress on the server and slower loading. Flat-file based boards can not compete with SQL bases ones, especially ones with SQL/PHP. Now UBB has OpenTopic which unless you are rich, is crap, on a crap server. It is basically UBB being run on Oracle, not much of a difference, still slow. Onto UBBThreads, well they decided to make, well buy and re-code a small bit of an already made board (used to be WWWThreads). It is PHP/MySQL based, yet it is more expensive and InfoPops support is horrible. I think I e-mailed them for support and they got back to me about 2-3 weeks later (is this really support??).

Anyway, the bottom line is, vBulletin is not expensive considering the already mentioned:

- Support
- Features
- Ability to edit almost everything
- A great deal of hacks/addons
- Friendly staff
- Speed!
- ect.

It is the best, of course I know opinions differ, but if you do not like vBulletin you don't need to be here :D (of course, if you are planning on getting it, stick around :p ).

Ok, I have typed enough :rolleyes: