IPS: Your passion will cost $1068 per year. And you won't be even be a pro. That's a more expensive plan. You're just the cheap passionate.

[Joel R]

The Pro plan costs $1788 per year. The main upgrade for paying the extra $720 is seeing who is typing back to you about your passion all year.

If you have the passion but don't care about who is talking (because, like, maybe your passion is boring and nobody is actually visiting), that's going to cost you only $1068. That's the cheapest amount of passion that IPS will accept.

And by the way, this is the discounted passion if you pay annually! The monthly passion plans cost more.

Sign up for Invision Community

invisioncommunity.com

 

[snerd]

 

[mysiteguy]

SSDD

 

[Joel R]

Some fun thoughts in no particular order:
- So, to clarify, the cost of $1068 isn't actually for your passion project itself. This is the cost of the community *on top of* of your passion. I suppose you could go cheap on the actual passion, and then spend all of your money on the community. Normally it's the other way, but who cares, you're passionate!
- On the Creator Pro account, you get Live Community Basics. This is the set of fancy new live features, which gives you 2 Live Topics / month. So you're paying an extra +$720 from the basic plan to get ... 2 Live Topics? Usually the point of Live is that they're dynamic, in the moment, and something that changes more than once every two weeks. If your community only talks about the same two topics for two weeks, then your community is as boring as TAZ and probably don't need this plan anyways.
- Maybe the 2 Live topics is, like, the top two topics? In which case, I think everyone on this plan should just merge their entire community into 2 topics just to take full advantage of the Live Topics.
- The business plan is $6,588 where you get AI image moderation and AI image object tagging. Like, someone uploads a picture of an apple, and it gets tagged as apple, and then you can search for an apple. It's like +$5000 more so someone can tell you that you're looking at a picture of an apple. Except it's not an apple. It's a photo of a person's [ ] and the system didn't properly recognize it.
- You won't be able to afford their Corporate & Enterprise plan. If you were, you honestly wouldn't be the kind of person on TAZ reading trashy topics like this, ha. But let's pretend for once that you are actually a corporate and enterprise person. At this point, you don't need passion. You don't even need to run your own community. You just need money. What's included: advice and consulting, active community management, moderator training (who are you training?? you should just let IPS moderate for you, it's literally the previous bullet point!), and a personal account manager who will make in-person visits. Which of course you'll pay for, so they can talk about how passionate they are for your community so you don't need to be.
- Self-hosted license, as expensive as it is with IPS, when fully loaded is still $200 cheaper than their cheapest cloud plan -- the cloud plan where you "create a community around your passion." Except you can do it cheaper. On your own self-hosting. Where you have to learn and make mistakes the hard way. Where you sometimes want to give up, but you keep going. Where sometimes it's a shoestring budget, big aspirations, and the only thing fueling you is ... actual passion.

 

[TrixieTang]

I think they might be targeting enterprise clients these days. Just a hunch.

 

[Nev_Dull]

Hmmm. That doesn't seem so bad. I usually have to pay by the minute for my online passions.

 

[Hakuna Matata]

Self-hosted license, as expensive as it is with IPS, when fully loaded is still $200 cheaper than their cheapest cloud plan

No, it is even worse. The cheapest plan does not include full Pages, except for some basic functions. The functionality is significantly cut compared to self-hosted license.

 

[we_are_borg]

I think they might be targeting enterprise clients these days. Just a hunch.

There targeting enterprise clients for years now, they do not care about clients that are small fry. See it like this one enterprise client can bring in 2 hobby clients in money. Also enterprise clients are far more willing to pay for additional services like support.

 

[jair101]

Sorry for being daft, but what is a "Live topic"?

 

[Oldsmoboi]

Eventually, I'm going to have to hire someone to migrate all of my Pages articles to Wordpress and maybe migrate the forum to Buddypress.

For now, I'll just hold on until they tell us that there is no more self-hosted.

 

[Ramses]

See it like this one enterprise client can bring in 2 hobby clients in money

I don't think there are so many enterprise clients but way more hobby or small business sites.

Sorry for being daft, but what is a "Live topic"?"

AFAIK this wasn't yet communicated. My guess would be a topic autoloading new posts.

 

[Joel R]

I don't think there are so many enterprise clients but way more hobby or small business sites.

AFAIK this wasn't yet communicated. My guess would be a topic autoloading new posts.

It was communicated to clients

 

[Oldsmoboi]

It’s a neat feature, but I don’t think it’s really needed for a lower traffic hobby site.

 

[Ramses]

It was communicated to clients

Isn't this called as live viewing on your images? Live topic must be something other.

 

[KimmiKat]

Maybe Matt wants to top Mr Elon!

Although InvisionBoard is targeting the big boys, there are many other mboard software packages for the small fries.

 

[Pete]

Though I think there are fewer than there used to be, and in particular I don't think the free options are moving at any real pace to be competitive...

 

[jair101]

I am still confused about Live Topics, I appreciate your suggestions, but I believe it must be something else as there are only two topics for the Pro plan...can't believe IPS will list it as a main feature if it is just whos typing kind of feature.

Anyway, I just noticed that even the self-hosted plan now is being advertised only to enterprise customers, no mention about being a cost-effective solution to advanced hobbysts whose communities do not produce enough income to afford cloud. In fact the entire self-hosted page is pretty much advertising for the cloud offering

Self-Hosted

invisioncommunity.com

Self-hosted licensing allows you to manually host Invision Community on your own server.
Alternatively, gain access to the entire suite and allow us to host your community!

Self-hosting your community
Self-hosted licensing may be a good fit if you have special requirements, have already invested in an existing infrastructure and have an IT team that are able to support the demands of a complex web application such as Invision Community.

Consult your IT team​

Self-hosting a community requires a thorough understanding of maintaining an infrastructure that is compatible with our platform and suitable for demanding web applications. We recommend consulting with your IT team before choosing a self-hosted license, or you may contact us and we will be happy to discuss your specific needs.

Even from the tagline on the top, "yeah, yeah, we have self-hosting, but please check our enterprise offering". No mention that it works if you want to optimize your budget. Probably this falls under "special requirements". And, oh, you need IT team, because this is a complex web application, you can't do it on your own! The entire self-hosted page is basically - "Run away to the cloud offering, self-hosted is not something you want".

Can't think of another company offering a product only to advertise it as "our other product is so much better, don't even bother with this one".

Before the IPS apologists jump on me, yeah, I know, they run business, go with the times, yada, yada. I made peace with the fact that they are pricing me out of their services long time ago. Fair enough, I am about to do the same to my members as I can't afford to subsidize the running of my community to run for free anymore. I just find mildly entertaining the constant wiggling between pushing 100% towards cloud/enterprise and trying to explain yourself to self-hosted/budget clients that they still mean something to you, while all your actions point to the opposite.

 

[LeadCrow]

I am still confused about Live Topics, I appreciate your suggestions, but I believe it must be something else as there are only two topics for the Pro plan...can't believe IPS will list it as a main feature if it is just whos typing kind of feature.

It may be a kind of very intensely updated topic type, like during a realworld event or videostream such as CES or Apple reveals where multiple staff or even members write comments or updates very frequently and the regular strategies for handling spam, editing, caching are inadequate.

Its somewhat forward-thinking that factors in that webmasters would like their audience watching commentary on their own website rather than leaving to another that could even be paywalled or have some limitations (like soccer matches which you cant stream but are free to summarize with your own commentary while the action plays).

 

[FTL]

Oh and despite all this massive cost, they removed post numbers years ago and refuse to bring them back, even as an admin option. What a petty thing to do. They're important and I couldn't believe it when I found out and just walked away, other, useful features be damned.

 

[DarthVader]

Eventually, I'm going to have to hire someone to migrate all of my Pages articles to Wordpress and maybe migrate the forum to Buddypress.

For now, I'll just hold on until they tell us that there is no more self-hosted.

Similar to what I did. I moved one of my projects away from XenForo to WordPress + BuddyBoss. You won't regret it! BuddyBoss 2.0 just launched! Truly one of the best decisions I made for my community.