With Nexus on hold, and more being focused on IPB 3.0, it's shaping up to be quite a nice release, from what I can tell.

Just a quick question though, will licensing options still remain the same once 3.0 is released, or will they change again?

I bet that they will increase the price, they need to keep in touch with vBulletin price.

Did the VB price just go up or something, I was there like a week ago? Anyways if the price increases I'm going to raise a stink, we are paying $150.00 to obtain a license. Then you have to pay $50 bucks a year to access to upgrades and tech. support. I realize what a powerful piece of software this is and the improvements being made are justifying the price increase. We now have a great community forum, resources database, and new board in development.

If the price is going up I would say IPS really needs to explain their reasoning, other than we need to make more $$$. So that is a reason, but if we aren't seeing a lot then I don't see why you would hike it up just to compete. And I am piloting VB for use somewhere, but out of the box it looks like complete trash, same with the website... and I cry everytime I gotta use the ACP its like 2.0 all over again.

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?t=268714 (And they've send an e-mail to all customers, I didn't even bothered to read it)

It's only Internet Brands fault, hope they will not buy IPS too ...

I like the $25 semi annual renewal fee IPB has, that puts us in the middle range.

If you go too high you leave too much room for other companies to come in and become the new underdog. Reasonable pricing is the key because eventually you hit a breaking point where the masses are no longer willing to pay.

PS. And yes I agree, IPB has the best Admin panel I have ever seen

And when you think that the new admin panel from IP.Board 3 will be even better.

What has happened both times in the two (?) license structure changes is you still get what you were promised or better.
i.e. When they removed the lifetime option, if you had already bought it you still got it. Same with perpetual. And if you had a yearly license it when down from $69.95 a year to $50 a year.

I can't see why any future changes would be different

I'm going to move this to the general feedback forum. This forum is really meant to submit IPB feature suggestions, and licensing is something the management deals with.

Alright with VBulletin though they increased pricing, but they removed renewal fees for their product addons. I can see how that would work out, but will IPS reduce the renewal fee, I don't even know what it is, I feel like none of my addons have expired? (Debbie don't even think about checking )

Well price is justified to a certain point, 25 every 6 months sounds cheaper than saying 50 dollars a year. So in people minds its like only 14.99 not 15, or 19.99 not 20, ect. Its the cheaper effect. In the end its the same out just how IPS wants to market it out.... and how the market sees it

I think transfers need to be brought back only if its between existing customers and both parties have to open a ticket and confirm details or maybe share a transfer key or something, like you do with a domain. Or you can transfer a license yourself? You have a place where you plugin the other customers ID, you generate a key and give that to them, and then you hit start transfer and maybe staff can approve it or deny it (setting)? And poof away it goes.

IPS should just say if you want to do it we have no liability if you get screwed over. And there couldn't be fraud because its between two customers and you can't transfer if the ID doesn't existing in what you have in your account. I really think that would be the safest way to do it aside from no transfers at all which is a pain.

So to sum it up customer to customer transfers should be re-thinked. Your still making money because they are paying a re-renewal fee when it expires, ect. Feedback on this?

I honestly don't see why people will complain if IPB put their prices up. Everything else in the world has increased in price whether its food, petrol etc surely you can't expect companies not to raise their prices to keep inline with inflation... Cest la vie...

Honestly we have not discussed raising the price or changing license terms to date

Yeah but its a software license... its not like IPS is paying to ship me invoices or something... and last time I checked the price on my bandwidth pipe has been the same My point is centered around unless you are cranking out a lot of new stuff, and going to provide more "free" stuff for customers and do more for people on a faster paced basis, then raise the price. If your keeping the same and just raising to keep in touch with everybody else... well I can't tell you your wrong nor can I say your justified

You are being slightly ignorant there Ryan.... They may not be physically shipping items out but they still pay bills eg electric, I take they pay rent or rates all of these things are increasing everywhere... So I don't see why they wouldn't increase for IPB. Therefore as I said I wouldn't be surprised if there was a price increase to keep inline with inflation... I don't think the staff would be too thrilled with a pay cut to maintain the same level of service

At the end of the day, I think most current customers would be fine with a price hike, but maybe sustaining the current IPB prices may be good for IPS. Having IPB stay at 150 might deter some people (Ones who are money conscious) from going ahead and buying other forum software that are a bit higher than theirs. I know a couple of people who were going to by Vbulletin, but once they notice it was 180 they decided not to.

Well they are probably reaching the point where customers are not buying as fast, switching to other company's or mainly because most people already have IPB. So how else are they going to make money off us?

Good to hear. Please don't get any ideas from this topic.


That really makes no sense at all. Do you have any justification?

They stopped them for a reason. They said before that they took no liability, but they still got it in the rear when they wouldn't intervene (or worse, when they did). The "fraud" that occurred was not the fraud you're talking about, the fraud was stuff like sellers selling a license, then rescinding it by claiming it was stolen. Or sellers selling a license 45 times and just adding people as alternate contacts. They wont rethink license transfers.

Will this will be free to existing IPB customers [even with the $25 renewal]?

It is technically an "Upgrade."

It will be free if you have an active support contract.

As far as license transfers, I'm a bit upset that they don't do anything at all (I'd like this IP.Blog transferred to my perpetual license account,) but meh. It's for the better.

I now this topic is becoming slightly aged, but here's a good question for you. After reading through that post with vBulletin's new licensing pricing, how would IPS raising their licensing price become more in line with vBulletin? Their own is $180 initially, then $40/year after that. It would take 3 years and then the price of vBulletin actually is cheaper than IPS if the IPS customer is faithful and renews every 6 months if they need it or not.

In my opinion, IPS raising any prices on the IP.Board license would be very detrimental.