[DavidDavidDavid]

Darkun: exactly what do you mean by "too good to be true?"

Don't take their marketing hype too seriously (it's hard to, actually; they do it in the tacky way of those 2 a.m. radio spots for hair renewal). But what you need to do is ask yourself what it is that you want to accomplish, and how SBI! might help.

I'll be three months with them come the 16th, and I am pretty disappointed that I can't even load up a simple .ani or .cur file because they don't support it (and they don't answer me why not, except to say that "it was a policy decision that was made"). Moreover, I have been, for almost two weeks now, trying to resolve why their server keeps screwing up my very simple JavaScript image-swap. It took three days and three different reps before they even acknowledged I had a problem for which they are responsible for resolving (as soon as they saw the word "JavaScript" they immediately did the usual tech support thing and said it wasn't theirs, it had nothing to do with them, they only support their own stuff). It took another three days before they received my webpage and the accompanying images in question; for some reason I kept sending it (through Yahoo!) and they kept missing one file or another. Then after a message Wednesday morning that a supervisor was looking into the matter, nothing. Nothing since Thursday morning. Well, I'll give them an e-mail Tuesday and see what's up. Mind you, that's a simple image-swap I'm talking about -- onMouseOver, onMouseOut -- that works perfectly on my end but when uploaded to them gets screwed up. Yes, all necessary files were uploaded to them. No, nothing is wrong with my code/script. The worst thing, again, was technical support trying to get out of investigating the matter in the first place.

And that's not to mention the silliness that can happen in their private forums from people with psychological baggage -- since SBI! traffics in hopes of financial independence, and of course the people most susceptible to that kind of stuff are the tense and anxious ones among us. (And if it's simple mindless rah-rah multi-level marketing-style positive motivation you need, you can find plenty of it in the SBI! forums. As a matter of fact, mindless rah-rah is almost a requisite for posting.)

But for all that, I have to say that I viewed them as a learning experience from the git-go and feel that I have learned a lot, well worth the $300 I paid (I've since bought about that amount of money in books on web development, anyway [since SBI! will only cover so much ground, naturally enough]).

You have thirty days to get 100% of your money back, with a pro-rated refund anytime thereafter. For all my well-founded criticism of them ("hidden costs" like extra charges for blogs and forums, etc.), I applaud their generosity and fair-mindedness in that respect. They put their money where their mouth is, and of all that could be said about them, that itself says quite a lot.

So you have plenty of time to decide. Keep fiddling with it and see if it works for you.

Me, I'll stay with them for the learning experience. If you look as it as a learning experience, then you can't go wrong. Otherwise, back to my original question: what, exactly, is it that you want?

I would definitely recommend them for people who aren't interested in internet nuts-n-bolts -- and for people like myself who are, I would caution them to not ask too many questions related to nuts-n-bolts. It's a tool, and like any other tool, it will have its limitations. Typical newbies won't come up against those limits too soon, if at all, while newbies who are otherwise "tinkerers" just might, since SBI! can have an almost "monastic" bent of mind over there (not that that's bad in itself, necessarily) and don't welcome questions which could be construed as challenging the premises of their methods and operations.