Why vBulletin cost so much money?

[Zachery]

Thread moderated, lets keep things clean.

[HR3rdGen]

cuase people who write code have to eat

[ManagerJosh]

Before Red Hat changed its product lineup, Red Hat charges you for the discs/costs for manufacturing the product and support for the product. It does not charge you for the download. You could even download it for free.

When they moved to the enterprise edition, they did something funny with the license agreement or found some sort of loop hole. Either way, they used that loophole to charge people.

Anyways, some key differences between Visual Source and the Open Source/GNU/GPL Licensing:
-the right to redistribute copies.
-the right to improve the program, and release the improvements to the public

You are prohibited in doing that to vBulletin.

[ZacUSNYR]

I own 2 vBulletin license - they make a great product.

And if you do things right - that $160 is NOTHING compared to some of the money you can make using the software and the mods available over at vbulletin.org

Edit: In fact - i've had people say to me "How much did you pay for that forum software?" and I tell them and they say "THAT'S IT??? Wow that's cheap - I thought that it would have been really expensive".

It all depends on how you implement it. If you want to have a small site for you and your buds to talk about drinking at the bar - probably not worth it.

[eXaulz]

cuase people who write code have to eat

Hah, good one.

But, nevertheless, vBulletin is one *hell* of a product. Distributing it for free would be a loss. vBulletin can handle millions, upon millions of users and posts... and still at a great speed, without any modification. I highly doubt Gaia-Online (http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/? - biggest "phpBB" board on the net), SMF, MyBB, USeBB or anything else can do that. IPB can do it too, because alot of hard work and testing wa sput into it.

The developers at Jelsoft are getting paid... therefor, they do the best they can possible.

Once you purchase it, you won't regret it, and you wqon't look at another bulletin board system ever again.

[Zachery]

Gaia is no longer phpbb and hasn't been for several yaers now, they are using something of the original code base, but its more of a thanks to the original developers.

[eXaulz]

Yeah, phpBB wasn't really built for that. Plus I heard that their installation was so heavily modified you couldn't call it phpBB anymore.

When have you seen someone switch from vBulletin to something else, because of speed/the forum couldn't handle it? Nope, never... the only reason vBulletin would be slow is because of the server behind it.

[albn]

I use both vBulletin and IPB. I have to say I prefer vB.

[ProperMethodz]

I've used many BBS from YABB to IPB to phpBB to Nuke and have found that vBull is by far the most robust and feature rich bord in comparison to the above mentioned.

I will say this, SMF is giving vBull a run for their money and Jelsoft should seriously take a look at the adminCP of SMF and check the simplicity of how well and easily styles and forums are administrated. Other then that, vBull is very powerful and EXTREMELY customizable as soon as you get used to the back end.

[whitetigergrowl]

I hate vagueness. Everyones idea of 'feature rich' and 'robustness' is different. What you may find 'feature rich' I may find seriously lacking. And so on. It all just depends on what you are looking for. And some of the plugins for VB can and do slow down your site or add more sql queries. So dont just start installing whatever looks cool. You can have that best looking plug-in on your forum...but because of poor coding have it eat up a ton of your system resources and slow down your forum/site. Discriminate.

[eXaulz]

I'm willing to bet cold hard cash that most components/mods/etc add a load and (they do) add more SQL queries.

is this you? if so, I'm sure you are strong with your opinions (here and here). look, i'm sorry to tell you this, but forum software doesn't change a users "opinion" on your website, nor can it change statistics. it's the content. - are you on IPB or vBulletin man: your forum

[Floris]

Hello,

This topic has been exhausted. We know how much we ask for our products and we haven't changed our policy on prices in ages. Seeing how our software has developed it should actually have been increased by now.

We have no plans of updating our pricing in the (near) future.

Thanks for your pre-sales questions. If you have more please start a new thread with a new question. And thanks everybody for sharing your opinion.