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Message: [QUOTE="Bombastus, post: 90910, member: 2178"] A XenForo license costs $195 and buys lifetime use of the software plus twelve months of support and updates, after which the updates stop. That second half is where budgets go wrong. People price the license, buy some hosting, and assume they are finished. The recurring items are individually small, and there are more of them than anyone expects. Judge that $195 against [B][URL='https://goldmidi.com/community/threads/what-does-xenforo-do.17278/']the feature set a stock XenForo install ships with[/URL],[/B] and it reads well. Threads, member profiles, moderation tools, notifications, and basic search are all included. The parts that are not included are the parts that bill you every year. [HEADING=2]The license is the smallest number on the invoice[/HEADING] Three official add-ons sit outside the base license. Enhanced Search is $60, Resource Manager is $70, and Media Gallery is $70. Buy all three alongside the core software and your first year is $395, not $195. Renewals work the same way. The core extension is $55 for twelve months, and each add-on carries its own extension fee of $10 or $15. Own the full suite, and you are renewing four separate things for $95 a year. Removing the XenForo copyright line from your public pages is a one-time $350. That is nearly double the license itself, and several cost breakdowns still circulating online quote a lower number for it. Enhanced Search carries a second cost that the price tag hides. It runs on Elasticsearch, which is a separate service you have to host and keep alive. The $60 is a license fee, not a running cost. Hosting is the genuine variable. A quiet board is comfortable on a $12-a-month virtual server with 2GB of memory, while a busy one running Elasticsearch alongside wants $24 or $48. Price it as its own line. If you run several communities, the core license drops with volume. Three to five licenses cost $185 each, six to ten cost $175, and eleven or more cost $165. Those tiers apply to the core software. One more line exists for the nervous. XenForo will install the software on your server for a one-time $60, which is cheap next to a botched first attempt. [HEADING=2]XenForo Cloud bills you for traffic, not for members[/HEADING] Cloud removes the assembly work and prices it plainly. Starter is $60 a month or $648 paid annually. Standard is $100 a month or $1,080 a year, and Business is $250 a month or $2,700 a year. Paying yearly is not a rounding error either. Starter at $60 a month comes to $720 over twelve months, so the $648 annual rate saves $72 for committing up front. Every tier includes the complete suite with Enhanced Search, so there are no add-ons to buy on top. That closes most of the gap against self-hosting before you compare anything else. The ceiling is page views, not people. Starter allows 400,000 monthly page views and 50GB of storage, Standard allows one million views and 100GB, and Business allows four million views and 240GB. Member counts are unlimited on all three. That distinction catches people out. A forum with 800 chatty members and a heavy lurker audience will hit a page view ceiling long before a forum with 8,000 dormant accounts. The ceiling also enforces itself. Go over your quota and XenForo tells you, and if the overage runs into a second month, you are moved up to the plan that fits your usage. Your bill can change without you approving anything. Custom branding on Cloud is a flat $30 a month on every tier. On Starter, that is a 50 percent surcharge. On Business it is twelve percent, for exactly the same feature. [HEADING=2]Letting the license lapse costs you patches, not your forum[/HEADING] Work out [B]the five-year cost of owning a board[/B] and self-hosting wins on software alone. Core license only, that is $195 up front and $55 a year after, so $415 across five years. The full suite reaches $775. Cloud Starter across the same five years is $3,240, and that figure absorbs the hosting, updates, backups, and server maintenance you would otherwise handle yourself. Add a $24-a-month server to the self-hosted total, and the difference narrows to roughly $1,000. Whether that difference is worth paying depends on one thing. Time. If nobody on your team wants to patch PHP or restart a database at 2 am, Cloud is not expensive. The lapse question comes up constantly, and the short-term answer is reassuring. Your license grants lifetime use, so an expired extension does not switch your forum off or lock you out of the admin panel. It stops new releases and official support. The long term is less comfortable. A board sitting several releases behind is running old code on the public internet, and the $55 you skipped was buying fixes rather than features. [/QUOTE]

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