Before you Spend Any More of your Money for Software

By. Jeffrey A Solochek

This morning as I was going through my inbox I saw an email from a marketer about this software called ForumEqualizer. Now in the old days I would have just gone to the site and saw a use for the software and then went ahead and purchased it. After spending a fortune during the last 10 years I now do things a bit more frugally.

I like to use a tool called Copernic Agent Pro to do all my research so I would first open this application and do a search for ForumEqualizer and read any review on the product I could find. Then I would think to myself about exactly what the software does and then do a search on the phrase "Forum submitter" This brought up in the matches a link for PHPBB poster so I went ahead and looked at this software which cost less than half of what ForumEqualizer cost so now I was getting somewhere.

My next search was done on the site Sourceforge. I did a search for anything with PHPBB in the name of the description and came up with almost 400 matches. It never ceases to amaze me how many times I am about to buy something and all of a sudden I find an Opensource version. Not this time though.

The keyword submitter could also point to the word poster so I did another search for "forum poster" to see what I would find. I had no idea that people actually get paid by others to post on their forums but in the matches I found some forums where people who did this stuff could post as well as people looking for people to do this stuff for them. It is truly amazing what you can find on the Web these days.

Before we go on let me explain why I went through all of this. Take Microsoft Office which sells for almost $1,000. There is also WordPerfect Office and Lotus Smartsuite out there and both of the later 2 do not cost as much as the Microsoft one does. Now I could stop right here knowing that buying the WordPerfect or Lotus version I would be saving some good money but then I think to myself is there anything out there that does what I am looking for that has no money cost? that's when you discover Openoffice which is the free version office suite.

My son just went ahead and had some software created that helps people to make money on MySpace. Now nobody has the corner of the market with their software and there will always be alternatives out there. Most people who we just looking to add friends to their MySpace profile would probably buy something like BadderAdder. Another software out there create MySpace profiles called Spacepromoter. And then there are still a lot of other softwares out there that each do something on MySpace. Now if you went ahead and bought all these little apps the dent to your pocketbook would be rather large. My son has created a great office suite for MySpace which does all these things. Now eventually there will be other softwares that do what his Buddypromoter can do but there are always choices out there.