icespirit

A very good point, and very relevant to the thread's poll, however the poll in essence is completely useless if used a comparison between the listed CMSs. You might as well have asked a room full of 20-50 year olds which is the best car out of 5 cars. You can not compare the CMSs in question just because they are CMSs.

First of all though I'd like to openly say that anyone who think's a CMS should cost $500 to buy outright should crawl under a rock and die. I can't remember how many times I see people chime in with this kind of crap. When did software development become the 21st century version of Nike child labour?

Let's focus on purchase price for a minute, forget monthly licensing for now. NATS and MPA are wildly seen as the most popular options for Affiliate Software and last time I looked their purchase price ranges from $12,000 to $20,000 depending on a few factors. A fully featured (i.e. not a glorified mail merge application) ADULT CMS is much more complicated than Affiliate Software. I'm sure that any company posting in this thread who has tried to do both will find it hard to disagree with me. So why exactly has ElevatedX (I'm picking out this one just because it was discussed the most) priced its purchase option at nearly a third of the cost of NATS/MPA? I can't really get my head around this and vice versa, I can't understand why anyone is so shocked at the cost of PaysiteCMS.

I appreciate the underlying sentiment here but unfortunately that's a really crappy example that just confuses the less knowledgeable readers. You're assuming first of all that the same Doctor who treats your piles is also offering to treat your feet - which is just not how it works. I ask everyone to ponder that if you were in a hospital with some illness would you rather be sent by ambulance to 5 different 'specialists' across the city who have no working relationship with each other and no knowledge of the previous person's work or would you rather be treated in one hospital by a team of specialists who work together to treat your mysterious disease which gave you piles and sore feet.
We're not selling an All-in-one printer here where mechanical limitations affect the ability to perform as well as a specialised device. A companies ability to run multiple departments and seamlessly integrate them is limited only by the ability to hire enough good people.

CMS has become such a buzzword that I'm going to make it extra buzzy. PaysiteCMS provides a CMS Solution. Unless I'm mistaken, non of the other products in question do? Your $5k is only gonna get you so far and you're only gonna get a few yards down the road before your support requests or integration help requests eat into the sellers profit margin enough for him to start charging per hour or per ticket. I think similar economics apply to hosting packages that give you a gazillion megabits for the princely sum of 99 cents a year yet the guys selling 5megabits+server for $500 are still finding customers every day.
When you buy PaysiteCMS you are guaranteed that one company will be at your side from birth to graduation. You're guaranteed that every doctor in the hospital has seen the others naked in the shower.

You can market your template as "powerful and easy to use", and your software as "fully documented", we all do it, but look, if you're not an experienced tech who's been on the interweb for a few years or unless you've got in-house staff who you trust, you're gonna find it tough to release a GOOD site that has any chance of competing in today's environment.

More than a few programs have said to me recently that they're realising their forte is "sales and marketing" and they don't want to be a tech company any more. These are the guys who want a solution, the guys who want another flagship site that they can sell up the wahzoo. They don't want to cross their fingers and hope they find 4 companies who will work together to build the various element the site requires - Software, Hardware Infrastructure, Design and Implementation.

For those of you who are able to afford any of the CMSs on the market (and then some), when you're choosing your next CMS please think about things logically. Do you a) go with the companies which sell a cheap of the shelf product but who's super hardcore l33t programmers will code you the extra bits you need for a rate which allows them to break even or b) go with the guys who have the manpower to backup their software with 24 hour support and development?