195$ is a brazen, overpriced pricepoint for xenforo

Smartea said:
I realized it's a tough world out there, and ipbbgun is swinging with its Alice in wonderland delusions of cloud pricing, but come one. Of the things that charmed me most about xenforo was the completely humble 130 limited time deal. Even the 140 dollar pricing was charming.

You should have waited for your new editor , in upcoming 2.4, to slam this new offcloud price and make it sound better.
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i was lucky and was able to purchase my license and the domain for $25 because the owner had reached a point of exasperation with the developers of xenforo.
i have seen some of what he was upset about myself.
and really i would not pay the $195 for what is a basic forum offering trails behind what others offer.
but for a basic form it is probably one of the better offerings in the paid area if you cannot pay the higher price for the ones that offer more.
if you actually want a more functional website instead of a forum then you need to look at invision or the one from germany.
i have been looking at other software since i purchased my used license.
but right now i cannot afford to move as the price i paid was really cheap since the seller was not that happy with xenforo and was happy to get rid of his other license.
 
Opus X said:
i was lucky and was able to purchase my license and the domain for $25 because the owner had reached a point of exasperation with the developers of xenforo.
i have seen some of what he was upset about myself.
and really i would not pay the $195 for what is a basic forum offering trails behind what others offer.
but for a basic form it is probably one of the better offerings in the paid area if you cannot pay the higher price for the ones that offer more.
if you actually want a more functional website instead of a forum then you need to look at invision or the one from germany.
i have been looking at other software since i purchased my used license.
but right now i cannot afford to move as the price i paid was really cheap since the seller was not that happy with xenforo and was happy to get rid of his other license.
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Yes we get it now.... No need to keep repeating yourself for a million times.
 
Smartea said:
Correct, but the price increases should have been more gradual.
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Continuous price increases get more backlash than one larger increase at a point where prices were all increasing due to world-wide inflation off the back of a pandemic, various food and resource shortage, and several outbreaks of war/hostilities across the world.

$195 is not much, and you can always buy used which XF has been more than fair about continuing to allow 🤷‍♂️.
 
I am unsure of what I would do today if I had to do it over. 2014 was ten years ago and there may well be options out there that weren't around then. Given the state of vBulletin and the cost of nVision, Xenforo would win handily over those. But might I look at the OS world or something like that? Perhaps. That said, we had a lot more financial support back then so $195 would have been doable and our biggest expense now, as then, would be engaging a stylist to do the design and help get things setup (which was @Russ back then and likely still would be today).

We are too small for XF Cloud. I think I worked out that 4-5 months on the low-end cloud package would burn through our entire current budget. Having a managed solution would be nice for us in many ways, since there are basically two of us with the skills to manage the site and both have taken "holidays" at times for health or personal reasons. Fortunately, so far, our breaks have never coincided so one was always around. However, not at the cost of doubling or maybe even tripling our annual spend.
 
Conversations around forum pricing are incredibly interesting in the 2020s.

You can build incredibly robust online communities for free on social media platforms, from free forum providers like Jcink, and from free forum software like Discourse or SMF. There is truly more range of pricing for forums and online communities than ever before, and there are several options that continue to be low or no cost.

Xenforo self hosted has always been at a very, very competitive entry-level price point for over 10 years.
 
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I’m not entirely sure I’d put Discourse in the same category as SMF. Free, yes, but the technical setup and maintenance proposition is very different - you are not running Discourse on shared hosting, period. You require a VPS, it’s written in Ruby, uses Postgres and as such will be completely alien to most people in this debate. (Even if you feel comfortable running a VPS, the default installation is via Docker which may well be alien, and even if this isn’t, the Ruby + Postgres combo probably is.)

But it’s worth noting that Discourse also has a paid hosting option with numbers that are definitely comparable (and not necessarily flatteringly so) to XF Cloud.
 
As far as I’m concerned, they could raise the price to $800 if they’d just make it more Google-friendly. I’m extremely satisfied with XenForo, and we’ve spent a lot of money to get where we are, so you complaining about $195 is just plain ridiculous to me.
 
Digital Doctor said:
I think it`s too cheap.
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i think its fair enough for all the stuff thats built into it, then all the more you can spend on so many addons that...um starting to go against my own point lol but i think its fair enough, i was only surprised to find out about renewals so you have to auto renew addons even if you bought them a couple months ago....thats a strange policy i never saw.
i cant imagine trying anything else by now, once the new editor hopefully does not kill functionality/creative options, it seem to start coming into the sweet spot again like how vb 3.8 felt at that time.
 

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