[DragonByte Tech]

Originally Posted by BlackxRam

Is this software being worked on any more? I have had my eye on it for some time but it doesnt look like it has received much support. If I would have purchased this software back in October for a lifetime license I would feel a bit cheated right now because of the lack of support and updates. I do believe the last activity on the software was August 2015. What incentive is there for someone to buy a whole year if its going to be a whole year before it see's any kind of update?

Don't get me wrong, I think the software is awesome. But the future viability of it looks bleak based on it's history. I hope the trend changes.

Hi there,

Firstly, thank you for your interest

Right out of the gate I'd like to clarify the difference between updates and support. All of our products are supported. The tickbox here @ vb.org isn't just there for show. If someone reports a bug, we do our best to resolve it in a timely manner.

When it comes to updates, I'd like to draw your attention to this particular section of our profile:



Even if we had a team of full-time developers, actively producing updates for every single modification on that list would be impossible. The fact is, we don't have a large team - in fact, I am the only full-time developer. Our other developers are sub-contractors, not employees. They have day jobs that take priority.

I bring this up because under no circumstances do we guarantee any amount of updates to our products regardless of license length. The prices of our modifications are way, way too low to offer any such guarantees. If there were any such guarantees, we would need to charge 10x more per product, perhaps even more.
In other words, all our products are sold as-is. We offer free Lite versions even though we lose a lot of money by offering products with 70%+ of the functionality of the Pro version for this exact reason. If someone does not believe the existing Pro-only features are worth the asking price of the modification then we ask that they please do not buy the Pro version until they feel the Pro features are worth the asking price.


The rest of this post represents my own personal thoughts, not that of DragonByte Technologies as a company.

I feel this adequately addresses your point about feeling cheated, but I'd like to add that I also feel like our pricing structure works in the consumer's favour, even in situations where we aren't able to deliver feature updates within a customer's purchased license length.
If they just want the current version and they don't have a lot of money, they can buy the 3 Month version and renew if/when we have added significant value to the product (in their eyes).
If they want the current version and ensure that any new vB4 versions in the near future won't break our mods, they can buy the 1 Year version.
If they want to ensure that they will always be able to run the latest version, they can buy the Lifetime version.

Even the cost of a Lifetime license would not come close to covering the cost of the development. In fact, I would be hard pressed to find a single product we sell that has sold enough to cover existing development cost, never mind the time spent providing support (time which could be spent developing new features to any product). That's not to say our products have not sold well, but consider that a product that took 3 months to develop would be 8 hours x 5 working days x 30 days in a month x 3 months = 3,600 man-hours ? $35/hr = $126,000. Even by our most expensive products, $200 for a Lifetime version, that would require 630 Lifetime licenses sold in order to recoup development cost. That assumes that all 630 sales happened on day 1 and they require absolutely no support, which I'm sure you can agree is ludicrous.

Now if we wanted to get crazy, we could pretend that all of our products only took 1 month to develop, didn't involve weekends (haha), required no time to support, so let's do the math for our 74 vB4 releases.
8 hours x 5 working days x 30 days in a month x 74 products = 88,800 man-hours ? $35/hr = $3,108,000.
Even if we then assumed every product cost $200, that would be 15,540 licenses in total needing sold, just to recover development costs.

Obviously this math is horribly wrong since not every product took a whole month to develop, but I hope this illustrates why it's simply not feasible to deliver timely updates for every single product.


Fillip