Yeah, that's Slickage's $100k monthly fee. The amounts aren't exact, though. I send approximately the correct amount to an intermediate wallet of my own, and then it gets sent to Slickage via Coinbase.

The total cost will probably be around $1.5 million, which is more than I'd hoped, though not entirely unexpected.

When I first contacted Slickage, I stated my budget as $1.5 million. They estimated that only $1 million would be necessary. But the requirements changed in various ways, and (as always) various unexpected issues cropped up.

I expect that (especially after all this time) most people will be disappointed when the switchover happens because there won't be any major feature improvements over the current forum. My huge list of requirements will be met, but there's nothing groundbreaking in there. Building something (a little more than) feature-equal to SMF (which has been in development for over 10 years) isn't easy. But the new forum software is much more extensible and secure, so any future enhancements should be much easier to do.

There are 4 full-time programmers working on it, plus some additional outside contractors. You might be surprised by the cost if you've never looked into this sort of thing before, but it's actually pretty standard for a group of this size.