To renew or not to renew?

[Suzanne O]

and behind the times.

Not really.
If anything you could learn the coding behind it all.
I used to learn the visual basic and c language in a course i did at uni.
So i know something about what the guys do.
I wish i had of learned the php language better so then i could program all of my forums properly.

 

[Mendalla]

It turned out that until now I did not need vendor support: Whatever issues turned up until now could be solved successfully either by myself or with help by this customer forums.

This is part of my experience as well. My support payments (because that's what they are) are for updates, pure and simple. I have never opened a ticket. The user community is enough support for what I need given my site's relatively low needs and simplicity. That said, I am in a similar position with the ERP system I manage at work. Same licensing model, basically, in that we bought the software and then pay an annual maintenance payment (it's a percentage of current list so has varied a bit over the years). I have not needed actual vendor support in eons between my own skills and knowledge and those of my colleagues at our parent company. So we are really just paying for updates. The problem with them is that, IIRC, if you miss a year, there's a penalty if you re-up later so I can't take the approach I do here of waiting until I need the support to pay.