[robwoelich]

Originally Posted by meissenation

I think most of the people here are in an uproar because on your 3.8.x version, support for hundreds of SMS companies was 100% free. Now you roll out vb4.x version and alas there's hefty big subscription prices. I know when I first viewed this thread, I saw the support for only 2 carriers and that I had to pay for what was once included for free and said "No way in hell am I installing that." That said, thankfully my site is 99.999% US so now that you've included more carriers in your free/lite version, I can install and not worry about the subscriptions. Again, what once was offered free in your previous version you're now forcing international customers to people to pay for... that's the uproar.

That's the problem - you're looking at it in such black and white. You think that because I'm not including all the companies, I'm simply trying to charge for that list. The difference between the free and paid versions is a lot more than the companies included. Consider:

1. The previous version for vB 3.x has been discontinued for a year and a half;
2. The previous version was only guaranteed compatible up to vB 3.7;
3. The subscription version includes 7 more notification types than the free version now (8 more than the free version then) including really cool ones like being texted when someone registers or signs in;
4. The subscription version allows users to set hours they will and won't receive texts, so they won't get texted in the middle of the night;
5. The subscription version is fully supported, including installation and compatibility help;
6. Aside from the company list, the free version now already improves upon the old one because of an additional notification type (visitor messages) that wasn't present in vB 3.x

There's a lot more value in the paid modification than just the companies involved. The other reason I decided to keep most companies under the subscription version is because being in the U.S. I can't easily verify, troubleshoot, and add non-U.S. companies. It takes a lot of research and work to figure out what the newest international company settings are, and to try to work with users in each country (generally through language barriers) to test and verify these settings. Since this work is ongoing, compensation for it is not unreasonable.

I understand everyone is angry the full company list is not included, but it's pretty useless to include it when a lot of the listings didn't work and there wasn't an easy way to update them on the thousands of forums using the modification. Therefore, I stand behind my current versions and their respective free/fee status. :up: