bbsucks.com The bill
A per-seat runtime license arrives one invoice at a time, once a year, for decades — which is how a six-figure total gets paid without ever being written down in one place. Set these three to your numbers and it appears.
People who need a login on the system.
5250
Your number. The starting figure is a placeholder, not anyone's price.
$100$2,000
How long the license has been renewing.
140
$400 is a placeholder you adjust, not a claim about anyone's pricing. Your real figure is on your renewal invoice, and in most shops it is higher.
What you have already paid
$150,000
= 25 seats × $400 a seat × 15 years
Flat multiplication at today's rate. No indexing, no interest, no present value — just your three numbers, multiplied. It is a floor, not a total: your own invoices sit above it.
The next ten years, as things stand
Same seats, same license, with a 3% increase applied each year and disclosed.
$114,639
The same ten years on UBB
Half the license — and the engine, hosting, backups, disaster recovery and browser terminal on one invoice. The same 3% applied to our side too.
$57,319
The difference
Line one minus line two. Money you keep on your own assumptions, for changing nothing but what your programs run on.
$57,320
Over that decade, the difference is roughly another person on the payroll.
At 25 seats, $400 per seat per year, over 15 years: already paid, $150,000. The next ten years as things stand, $114,639. The same ten years on UBB, $57,319. The difference, $57,320.
Your real number is on an invoice in your drawer. Stop renewing it.
Send a tarball of your source and the compatibility report comes back automated, free and program by program — no call, no salesperson, no obligation. The assessment that follows is credited in full against your migration, and your current system runs in parallel right through cutover and is still standing the morning after. The only thing left to lose here is another year of the renewal.
01 The arithmetic
No discount rate, no net present value, no compounding you can't see. We sell on arithmetic you can check against the renewal invoice on your own desk, so here it is, with your numbers substituted live.
1 Already paid
seats × price × years= 25 × $400 × 15 = $150,000
Every year is multiplied at today's rate. Prices rose over that period and your seat count grew; we model neither, which is precisely why this figure is a floor. The real total is sitting in your accounts payable history, and it is bigger.
2 Next ten years, as things stand
seats × price × 11.4638793= 25 × $400 × 11.4638793 = $114,639
11.4638793 is 1 + 1.03 + 1.03² … + 1.03⁹, rounded to seven decimals — ten annual payments with a 3% increase each year. That 3% is the only escalation on this page, it is disclosed here and nowhere else, and it is applied to both sides. We multiply by exactly the figure printed above, so running this line on a calculator returns the same dollar.
3 Next ten years, on UBB
seats × (price ÷ 2) × 11.4638793= 25 × $200 × 11.4638793 = $57,319
Half the license is the standing commercial offer — not a promotion, not a first-year rate that resets on renewal. Engine, hosting, backups, disaster recovery and the browser terminal all sit inside that figure, on one invoice, and none of them are counted anywhere on this page as a saving.
4 The difference
line 2 − line 3= $114,639 − $57,319 = $57,320
Figures are rounded to the nearest dollar, and the difference is the subtraction of the two rounded figures shown — so what you see adds up exactly.
Nothing here is priced against your contract, your term, your seat mix or your support line. A real number needs your renewal invoice in front of us, and it takes about a minute once we have it.
We make no statement about what any vendor charges anybody. The slider opens on a round placeholder purely so the page renders something; every figure on it moves the instant you set that slider to the number printed on your own invoice.
We multiply flat at today's rate instead of reconstructing a decade of increases, and we leave out inflation and the hardware the runtime sat on. Your invoices are the real record, and in most shops they total considerably more than this page does.
Leaving the increase off our side would have widened the gap. We put it on both, because a comparison in which only the other party's price rises is not a comparison.
The server, its backups, its disaster recovery and its eventual replacement sit inside our half and are excluded from the difference above. Whatever that box costs you today — and whatever the people who keep it alive cost you — comes off on top of every figure on this page.
Half the license and free hosting are the terms in full, and they do not move with the size of the number above. The rest is on uniquebb.com/pricing.
02 What you move to
UBB is the whole runtime and everything underneath it — engine, hosting, backups, disaster recovery and a browser terminal, on one invoice. Your programs and your keyed data files run unmodified, byte for byte. Nothing is rewritten, nothing is converted, and nothing is left behind on the old box.
5,079 Business Basic programs, 536,000 lines of source, a 100% parse rate — not “mostly compatible”, not a port, not a rewrite. Then we read the data back out: 3,631,827 records across ten production files, compared byte for byte against the originals, exact, the largest single file 1,704,372 records. Arithmetic was held to the same standard — 245 of 245 cases penny-exact under the PRECISION rounding model, because a cent of drift at month-end is not a rounding difference, it is a restatement.
That runtime stops dead at 2 GB per file. There is a live 2.9 GB order-detail file in front of us right now that it cannot open at all — it fails on the first read. Not slow: unopenable. UBB has no such ceiling. A file is bounded by the disk underneath it, not by the engine on top of it, so the same file opens and keeps growing into the terabytes with nothing archived, nothing split in half, and nothing to explain to an auditor. Every month you leave it, that file gets bigger.
Freeze on the Friday, copy the files, run the weekend in parallel, point the terminals at the new host on Monday morning. Your programs are not edited and your data files are not converted, so there is nothing to re-implement and nothing to migrate — which is why the calendar says a weekend where a rewrite quotes three years.
A keyed lookup on a 1,344,450-record customer master returns in 2 ms. Scanning that same file end to end takes 3,665 ms. That is the distance between an engine that reads your keys and one that reads your file, and it is measured, not projected. An idle session costs 0% CPU, so a hundred terminals parked at a menu cost you nothing. Reporting we build against your own corpus, and the assessment determines the priority.
Same screens, same keystrokes, same F-keys, same month-end close. The programs stay yours, the files stay in their native format, the browser terminal behaves like the terminal on the desk, and your people get retrained on nothing.
50 GB of live ERP data. 1,344,450 customers, 1,541,007 order lines, 93,301 items. That is Unique Photo's own book of business, in Fairfield, New Jersey, trading since 1947 and running on UBB. This is not a laboratory result we are asking you to take on trust — it is the engine our own orders ship on every day, before it is ever sold to anybody.
The compatibility report is free and automated. The assessment that follows it is credited in full against your migration, so the moment you go ahead it has cost you nothing. Your current system runs in parallel through the entire cutover and is still sitting there, untouched and licensed, the morning after — going back is pointing the terminals at the old host. There is no bridge to burn here.
Half the license. Hosting free and never a line item. The migration measured in days, and the assessment credited back in full. Get the free compatibility report.