I'm not sure if it's because I'm a new bee or if this is the case. I see that I'm spending alot of my forum, and it hasn't even opened.

1) Vbulletin - $160
2) VBSEO - $100 (second hand)
3) Potential skin developer - $100-$300
4) Potential forum fixer - $50-100
5) Special features (linked product database website) - $500

I'm sure the list will increase as more things become of interest, unfortunately. Am I silly to be investing so much in the forum to make it distinctly different from the two established forums that would be my competition? Am I going about setting up vbulletin properly?

Forums certainly aren't cheap! I bought two new owned vB license a month or so ago, paid a designer to do a custom design for NY Chat, I'm considering buying vBSEO for Discuss NY too, but I'm still not convinced it worth the $$$.

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- Big Dan proprietor of DJ Talk

Depends, I had initially started my forum on phpbb and it had managed to garner quite a few members when it was on phpbb.

From my perspective it takes a lot of hard work to run a forum, money is just one aspect of it.

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Why most forums fail within 1 year!

India Travel Forum | India Travel Directory | Free Travel Directory

Once your forum starts to grove you will easily see that you'll be spending more money mainly on servers

The license cost will remain nothing next to server costs

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Ayyas.Com | Ayyas.Com Boards | Ayyas.Com Archive | Ayyas.Com Pic. Gal. | Ayyas.Com Blogs.

Yep, its all about server costs. once your site starts to grow to any kind of decent size you will be forced to get a dedicated server and then you are looking at a minimum of $150 a month and probably a lot more.
Having a forum is a lot of fun and a great experience but it takes a lot of work, dedication and $ to keep it going.

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Photoshop

Not to even mentioned advertising, promotions and contest

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I've actually done pretty well on not spending too much. Just the vB owner license and vBSEO (and domain name and hosting), but that is it. Haven't spent a dime on advertising yet.

Well, I run a few big forums, but really have never built one ground up. I have a site, but its really dead, basically for my development purposes

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I think that depending on the route you take (premium domain, vbulletin, etc) the up front costs can be pretty high.

I guess it just depends how much money you have as to what seems expensive

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Bryce R [[ BLOG ]]
The Blogging Café - Blogging Forum
Do you run a forum? Check out my forum owners blog.

I sure hope the initial start up costs start going down, cause this forum thing is taking its toll on my credit card bill.