The other day I mentioned that one of the problems with ArsTechnica’s site is the pricing model for Open Topic, the bulletin board system they’re using. I just wanted to clarify exactly what I meant.
Open Topic is a product of InfoPop which sells the extremely popular Ultimate Bulletin Board system. I love the UBB and own several licenses to the software, but about 2 years ago Ted O’Neill — the programmer responsible for the UBB — announced he was working on an enterprise version, which was very good news. The bad news was that when he finally announced it, Open Topic was a hosted-only solution which was priced very high in my opinion. Since it became apparent that I wouldn’t be able to afford InfoPop’s prices, and didn’t want to stick with a CGI solution like the UBB, I eventually stumbled upon Conversant, and am very happy with that choice.
Anyway, just how expensive is OpenTopic? The entry level professional plan will allow you 100,000 page views for $250/month, with anything over that charged at $29 per 10,000 page views. That’s $2.50 per thousand page views initially, and then $2.90 per page thousand page views above and beyond that. That’s extremely high.
But it gets worse because of the formula they use to calculate how many messages you can store — your maximum allowable message base is 15 percent of your total monthly page views. So if you’re paying $250 for the 100,000 page view option, your message base can’t be larger than 15,000 messages or you incur additional charges at the rate of $29 per 1,500 posts stored.
When I finally ditched the UBB I had 25,000 messages stored on my most popular web site, which was receiving about 100,000 page views per month — so I would have been looking at about $440/month for a single discussion forum on a single web site, and that number would have continued to grow as more messages were posted.
The next level from a 100,000 page view plan is a 250,000 page views plan which starts at $625 and would definitely be out of my league.
Now, a web site with the massive message base that ArsTechnica has might be able to reach a deal at significantly lower prices per thousand page views, but InfoPop really priced this system completely out of reach of small webmasters who wanted a more robust solution than the UBB offered.