Kia Ora Everyone,
We do appreciate the feedback and openness of everyone not only in this thread but also via our other channels as well as external channels. We do understand that no one likes price increases, neither do we. I want to assure you that I am passing your feedback over to our leadership team so they are aware of your thoughts and comments, it's important you are heard, that is after all one of the guiding principles of WHMCS.Community please feel free to be frank in this thread - it's important to us that we hear you and that you feel heard, whilst our usual community guidelines of Abuse & Linking to external parties remain, we are open to constructive feedback.
With all of this in mind, I do want to take a moment to address some of the feedback we have received in this thread as well as providing some resources that may be of assistance.
Firstly, for existing licenses, changes to our pricing will not take effect until July 1st, 2021. This is to give our existing clients time to digest and understand how these changes will impact them. It is worth noting also that the last time we made changes to our pricing structure was over 4 years ago in October 2016.
Secondly, I want to understand more about the concerns from our clients that are offering one-off services - WHMCS only considers customers who have an active service, addon, or domain to be an active client, and so it should be an accurate reflection of the number of customers currently actively involved with and being managed through your WHMCS installation. I highly recommend reviewing a post from WHMCS Kim that assists with managing your active client count:
For our Owned License Customers, I want to re-iterate that you can continue to use your WHMCS Owned License indefinitely - WHMCS will run forever on the version you are entitled to at the expiry of your support & updates service, and you are able to migrate to a leased license, if and when you choose.
Regarding the questions around why we didn’t increase the cost of support and updates, while this was considered, any increases would have needed to be made in-line with the changes being made for leased licenses. In making the transition to monthly, we are looking to simplify our licensing structure, bring consistency for users, and allow Owned users to spread their software cost out over the year.
For those of you that would like to discuss your specific use cases please submit a ticket to our customer service team via https://www.whmcs.com/submit-a-ticket . Please reach out to us and we're happy to provide you with more of an indication on what this change means for you.
For users moving to the Business Tier licenses, they will benefit from access to our Live Chat Technical Support for greater support access, as well as no branding.
For those who had their Support and Updates renewals refunded, please reach out to me via the community support link above so I can check into this further - I want to ensure that those of you that renewed before these changes are not penalized as this should not have impacted you.
There have been references to several other Billing Software Providers, we appreciate that for some clients these changes mean they will opt to investigate and ultimately move to alternative solutions, whilst we will be sad to see you leave the WebPros & WHMCS Family we understand that you need to make the decisions that are right for you and your business.
In terms of delivering updates we continue to aim to deliver major feature updates at least three times per year. We have many times considered introducing more frequent updates however based on client feedback we have retained the present schedule.
Please do keep the feedback and questions coming myself and the wider WHMCS Team are working to address your questions on the Community, Social Media, and via Support Tickets. I will continue to monitor this thread along with my colleagues and provide updates regularly.