[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by arrow816

I am sorry but this is a great product.

It is just a shame that the creators do not have any common sence in regard to price.
Really you are losing out on a large revenue stream just because you are trying to be so greedy. vBShout Pro - Lifetime costing nearly $100 is just a rip off. Why would I pay nearly the same price I can get a vblicence at for an addon? Really common sence goes a long way.

Think of it like this. You make a lifetime contract $20 you would gain an amazing amount of income as more people would be willing to pay $20 for than $100. Now maybe you think yes but we earn more on $100 per pro license instead of $20. But here is the golden question will you get more licenses sold at $20 than at $100 and im 99.9% sure you would easily double your annual revenue. More so when you have to understand that the minute your pro version goes live with in a week there is a warez site that has it avaliable for download to people for FREE.

So do your self a favour and dont think that trying to be greedy bastards will get you any where in this time and age as more and more people will just go down to the nearest warez site get it for free and you will get what? NOTHING.

--------------
Now to the problem i first noticed. You must be one of the only shoutboxs still out there that does not allow usergroup restricting and access. This is not in the lite or pro version and it is a real let down that I have no ability to control what user groups can post and what ones cant.

Next is the annoying resize box on chat impute. I dont want to give my users to option to play around with the size them come crying to me when they cant fix it.

Next is the inability to create chat rooms that can be usergroup restricted. aka an administrator or staff online chat. A good idea you sadly seem to have missed.

Next is the lack of overall control.

In the end. For a group that says this is not a hobbie but are livlyhood you seem to be doing hardly any better. I would expect from a group charging nearly $100 a bug free fully working better than any other shoutbox product. Instead of a shoutbox barly better than most other shoutboxs and that is only if you purchase the pro version with the lite version being no real improvment on the many free ones already.

--------------

Ps if you think im talking out of my ass just send me a private message I can link you to 10 sites it took me 1 second to find containing clean nulled versions of your product fully working.

Thanks for the input on our business =)

The company is doing just fine as it is, and as a general rule we only solicit business advice from people who run successful software development/publishing companies, as people who don't tend not to understand the realities involved.

Just as a quick example - you claim that if we slashed out price by a fifth we would double our revenue, for this to happen we would have to sell 10 times more licenses. That means 10 times as much support, which means 10 times LESS time for updating products or creating new products - that would mean that within 3 months even if we were in fact making twice as much out of vBShout, we would be missing out on another 2 or 3 revenue streams, which would actually mean we LOSE money =).

Regarding Piracy - price isn't an issue for most people who pirate things. You can find pretty much any piece of software, music or movie pirated online. In addition you can find people illegally hosting mods given out for FREE here on vb.org - i'm pretty sure it doesn't get much cheaper than free.

Iain