I wanted to get all of your opinions on free vs paid when it comes to forums and SEO. I've heard multiple things thus far, some people say that SEO doesn't work on free forums, but others say that it works just as well on free as it does paid. What are all of your opinions? I posted this on WMS as well, I am excited to see the suggestions and tips that I may receive.
I'm not sure I completely understand your question.
If you are asking if it matters whether the forum is paid of free for the links to be counted by Google, then free vs paid is irrelevant as long as the page can be spidered by Google and the link is a normal link without the rel="nofollow" attribute.
If you are asking whether you can get pages ranked on a paid forum vs. a free forum then it is again irrelevant as long as you allow Google to crawl and index those pages.
The only thing that would affect SEO would be if you had a paid forum that was private where you didn't allow Google to crawl and index the pages. Then the pages on that forum would not rank in the search results and the internal links that people create from inside the forum would not count at all for SEO purposes.
Google doesn't care whether you run a paid forum or free one. If you are selling links and they find out you are then yes they will care. But as long as you are not selling links, they don't care one bit.