Originally Posted by Rob

You'll think free is good until you have to upgrade and pay. It's easier to pay the small fee up front and not worry about it. If you want your forum to be successful, start with what you're going to grow with. Trust me on this, I started a sports forum using PhpBB because it was free. After I had 30 or more regular posters, the forum crashed more than it loaded. I had to dump the database and migrate the tables into a VBulletin database (which was an astronomical pain in the ass). Now I have over a 100 regular posters and the forum doesn't even glitch using VBulletin.