Finding Nulled WHMCS distributions!

[mfoland]

Hello,

I want to let you know to be aware there's Nulled WHMCS's out there, and there's also one on Github.. or more I believe... that is fully decoded. It is my hope that if you find these, you report them to WHMCS! I've been finding sites that even have a nulled license, and I've reported.  I wish we could do a public shaming for those who use Nulled licenses 🙂 Please be aware! 

Speaking of decoded.. it would be nice if WHMCS would share some source to allow further development by developers. I'd even love if like the license addon was somewhat open source (not the part that does the addon check from your whmcs license), but the parts like verify, etc so that one could build on to the verification portal or make a total custom verification portal 🙂

[bear]

10 minutes ago, mfoland said:

Speaking of decoded.. it would be nice if WHMCS would share some source

I hear there's one on Github...oh. 😜

As long as there's encoded software someone will come up with decoding for it. It's important to remember that they're often imperfect versions, or worse, contain back doors and exploits. Really not worth it. 

[mfoland]

I agree. I wouldn't use a pirated copy. I actually pay for my license lol. I just think it sucks that people decode it and circumvent the licensing.

[brian!]

12 hours ago, mfoland said:

I want to let you know to be aware there's Nulled WHMCS's out there, and there's also one on Github.. or more I believe... that is fully decoded.

shock news - there are plenty of nulled (not decrypted) releases out there if you choose to go looking for them! 🤯

I don't really see the point of the thread - someone with a legit license is not going to switch to using a nulled version; anyone with a nulled version is not going to care about this thread either... and if they're daft enough to be using one and risking their online business and customers, then they'll pay in the end.

WHMCS have dealt with various GitHub's over the years, but there are still one or two left... and there always will be.

12 hours ago, mfoland said:

It is my hope that if you find these, you report them to WHMCS! I've been finding sites that even have a nulled license, and I've reported.

absolutely - about the only time I open a ticket with WHMCS now is to report the nulled URLs to their legal department and let them deal with the culprits.

anyway, there's a whiff of "Fight Club" about this topic, so i'll leave it there.

[mfoland]

I report any one that is found that not licensed :) why can’t people play fair and pay for their licenses?? If admin wants to they can delete this post :) I love WHMCS! It is one amazing billing platform 

[brian!]

Just now, mfoland said:

I love WHMCS! It is one amazing billing platform 

nurse! 👩‍⚕️

[bear]

5 hours ago, brian! said:

anyway, there's a whiff of "Fight Club" about this topic, so i'll leave it there.

Dangit, broke the first rule! :P

[mfoland]

lol! An admin can delete this post 🙂

[jster1324]

It would be nice if WHMCS offered a special license and require an NDA for source code. I fully own WHMCS licensing but I do use the decoded github repos to figure out how things really work under the hood. I cant begin to describe how useful its been with plugin development. We would be willing to pay good money for something like this.

[mfoland]

On 2/5/2019 at 4:01 PM, jster1324 said:

It would be nice if WHMCS offered a special license and require an NDA for source code. I fully own WHMCS licensing but I do use the decoded github repos to figure out how things really work under the hood. I cant begin to describe how useful its been with plugin development. We would be willing to pay good money for something like this.

I’m surprised they haven’t banned your license if you use the decoded lol. WHMCS does one heck of a job with coding for sure and like you I wish it could be more open source. Blesta is but they only code the license files. It allows for development. I’d like to build upon the license verifier but with smarty you can’t do crap. It needs to be open source!!

[mfoland]

@WHMCS ChrisD can you chime in here?

 

i have an idea for WHMCS. What if they charged for an open source version but encode the licensing parts so that developers could help better the program and make more detailed modules! Having a full perspective would be amazing

[jster1324]

3 minutes ago, mfoland said:

I’m surprised they haven’t banned your license if you use the decoded lol. WHMCS does one heck of a job with coding for sure and like you I wish it could be more open source. Blesta is but they only code the license files. It allows for development. I’d like to build upon the license verifier but with smarty you can’t do crap. It needs to be open source!!

To be clear I dont use a decoded WHMCS version. I dont even have a copy of the decoded version in my possession whatsoever. I only visit the github repo as reference when developing plugins. For example, I didnt like how the SendEmail API hook worked. So I go in and check out the WHMCS\Message and \Mailer classes and use them to create my own mail function within my plugin that still has all the email logging and uses the system email configuration. 

Seriously my company would be ready to pay a good chunk of change and sign an NDA if thats what it takes. Or they could just take the Blesta approach and only encode the license files. Its pretty well known that you can get every release of WHMCS for free already so they dont have anything to lose. Mind as well make some extra money off it. Also Im pretty sure this would make the application much faster. Comparing file size of the encoded to unencoded shows that theres like a 4x increase in file size after encoding. 

[mfoland]

2 hours ago, jster1324 said:

To be clear I dont use a decoded WHMCS version. I dont even have a copy of the decoded version in my possession whatsoever. I only visit the github repo as reference when developing plugins. For example, I didnt like how the SendEmail API hook worked. So I go in and check out the WHMCS\Message and \Mailer classes and use them to create my own mail function within my plugin that still has all the email logging and uses the system email configuration. 

Seriously my company would be ready to pay a good chunk of change and sign an NDA if thats what it takes. Or they could just take the Blesta approach and only encode the license files. Its pretty well known that you can get every release of WHMCS for free already so they dont have anything to lose. Mind as well make some extra money off it. Also Im pretty sure this would make the application much faster. Comparing file size of the encoded to unencoded shows that theres like a 4x increase in file size after encoding. 

How can you get a copy for free? Do you mean via Softaculous? Normally you need an active license to download WHMCS, unless one were to choose to be illegal and go the nulled route. The github decode isn't nulled I don't think. It should still have any of the licensing stuff in tact. 

 

I'd sign an NDA myself. There's some features I really want to build on to.  @jster1324 you can DM me, and we could discuss about building things! I do have the licensing addon 🙂 

 

WHMCS.. Please at least start either making more features available with the API, and working better with Smarty, to where even the license verifyer could be customized more.. or start opening some source up! 🙂 More people use Blesta for the pure fact that it's almost 100% open source. I think they say it's 99.4% open source or something like that, because it only has 3 encoded files!

[brian!]

On 03/02/2019 at 16:03, mfoland said:

I report any one that is found that not licensed 🙂

you won't be today - their license verification page is up & down like a yo-yo!  🙄

On 05/02/2019 at 21:01, jster1324 said:

I fully own WHMCS licensing but I do use the decoded github repos to figure out how things really work under the hood. I cant begin to describe how useful its been with plugin development. We would be willing to pay good money for something like this.

personally, I see nothing wrong with that... there are posts in these forums containing internal WHMCS functions that aren't mentioned anywhere in the documentation that i'm aware of. 😉

17 hours ago, mfoland said:

i have an idea for WHMCS. What if they charged for an open source version but encode the licensing parts so that developers could help better the program and make more detailed modules! Having a full perspective would be amazing

possibly because then others could more easily offer support services to the core product... I won't go into details (not even privately!), but I know for a fact that some users would have actively looked into do that if access to the core code was legally available... whether there is still an appetite for that, I don't know as the option isn't going to be available any time soon.

15 hours ago, mfoland said:

How can you get a copy for free? Do you mean via Softaculous? Normally you need an active license to download WHMCS, unless one were to choose to be illegal and go the nulled route. The github decode isn't nulled I don't think. It should still have any of the licensing stuff in tact. 

remember the Fight Club rules boys!

besides, decoded and nulled are usually two different things... it's often an either or.

[jster1324]

On 2/7/2019 at 10:05 AM, brian! said:

possibly because then others could more easily offer support services to the core product... I won't go into details (not even privately!), but I know for a fact that some users would have actively looked into do that if access to the core code was legally available... whether there is still an appetite for that, I don't know as the option isn't going to be available any time soon.

Is WHMCS making any real money from support? What little they do make can easily be made up plus more by offering to sell access to the source code behind locked doors. Why does this business model work so well for blesta? Opening the source for such a well known product would just expand the ecosystem like crazy.

WHMCS has the basis of a fantastic IT billing tool but their development cycles are just too slow to make it anything big before something else comes to dethrone them. They need to give it up to the people to make the needed changes that they dont focus on for whatever reason.

[brian!]

10 hours ago, jster1324 said:

Is WHMCS making any real money from support?

there are only 2 reasons to regularly pay WHMCS money - support and updates... if others took over providing alternatives to either, many users have seen enough to look elsewhere.

10 hours ago, jster1324 said:

WHMCS has the basis of a fantastic IT billing tool but their development cycles are just too slow to make it anything big before something else comes to dethrone them.

we've been warning them of that for years.. but they're not going to change.

[bear]

10 hours ago, jster1324 said:

Why does this business model work so well for blesta?

For them it's used as a selling point, and a direct comparison to WHMCS goes on all the time, with that being mentioned loads. They even created that silly "billing brawl" site to compare it. 

At least so far, I'm not seeing a huge advance in market share (anecdotal, no evidence but observation) over WHMCS. I don't care for the mass of obfuscated code on WHMCS, but don't think (mostly) viewable code is causing more uptake of the other one, but I do think the price and license changes WHMCS recently undertook absolutely opened a door for them. 

[Jafar Muhammed]

On 9/02/2019 at 5:55 PM, bear said:

but I do think the price and license changes WHMCS recently undertook absolutely opened a door for them. 

 

I have chatted with Blesta team, and they said they get customers migrating WHMCS > Blesta every day.

[yggdrasil]

On 2/9/2019 at 8:25 AM, bear said:

For them it's used as a selling point, and a direct comparison to WHMCS goes on all the time, with that being mentioned loads. They even created that silly "billing brawl" site to compare it. 

At least so far, I'm not seeing a huge advance in market share (anecdotal, no evidence but observation) over WHMCS. I don't care for the mass of obfuscated code on WHMCS, but don't think (mostly) viewable code is causing more uptake of the other one, but I do think the price and license changes WHMCS recently undertook absolutely opened a door for them. 

Actually I spoke with 2 persons last year, one of them from a major cloud hosting company, very known VPS/Server brand, and they moved to Blesta from WHMCS. They had no complaints and the open code was what pushed them into Blesta. This is what is pushing me towards them as well. Eventually, more developers will code for Blesta than WHMCS since WHMCS is in a locking down mode and Blesta is trying to attract third party developers and companies. People stick to WHMCS because of the ecosystem of existing third party modules, API integrations, etc. But this will slowly start to change as they alienate more developers. Blesta is not even close to the features yet, but they are making a steady progress while WHMCS is focusing their developing efforts on gimmicks bundled to external third party services. I want the software, the server code, not a gateway service to resell products from other companies which is what WHMCS is looking more every day now.

As for pricing, both Blesta and WHMCS are budget friendly. But WHMCS feels more like a remote service and giving up your business to someone else (permanent lease), while Blesta feels more like you are actually buying something (software you own) and getting something in return. I feel better for paying/buying something. I don't feel that way with WHMCS because I cannot modify anything. I rely on them for everything, even bug fixes...

Edited April 11, 2019 by yggdrasil

[wsa]

yes I have heard that also. I hope whmcs do something :)

[yggdrasil]

41 minutes ago, wsa said:

yes I have heard that also. I hope whmcs do something 🙂

About what? There is no way to stop piracy. This is why you provide an extra value, like support or updates. Either way, those people installing nulled WHMCS softwares are not lost customers either. No normal or sane person would install pirated software to run a business. You have no idea what that codes does on your server or the modifications they made. Someone would be insane to trust data and users to any software from malicious sources.

Hence, those people using this are not actually doing anything serious. If they cannot afford a few bucks to pay WHMCS, they are not doing money or running a business in the first place. Its most likely people playing around, testing, etc. I would argue the opposite, they probably eventually like what they see and decide to buy the software. In that sense, just like games, nobody pirates or steals things that are garbage or nobody wants to use. So it could actually increase WHMCS customer base.

A tiny company like WHMCS can't and will never stop piracy, they need to embrace it and just consider it part of doing business online. The same is true for all software developers. The people stealing your software are kids or people that don't have money to afford it in the first place, so they would never had paid for it either. No money to pay, no lost customer. It costs them nothing as well since those people would not be able to access WHMCS updates or support, they are just a user, that maybe one day becomes a paid customer.

[wsa]

I know but that not what am talking about I was about the blesta :)

[yggdrasil]

50 minutes ago, wsa said:

I know but that not what am talking about I was about the blesta 🙂

WHMCS will not do anything unless they feel competition is hurting their bottom line (income), this is usually when companies react, sometimes soon enough, sometimes too late. Competition is a great thing for consumers because it gives us choices, it also forces companies to improve. Blesta might not be hurting WHMCS yet, as they don't have all the features, but I see more and more third party developers building stuff for Blesta and WHMCS at the same time. That means, Blesta is slowly growing its ecosystem of third party support and vendors. This is what WHMCS has that others lack today. As Blesta keeps adding more and more vendors, API services, and modules, and more developers code for Blesta, WHMCS will absolutely see its user base shrinking, since it will lose its competitive advantage. Its closed code, its more expensive but it still has more features. Once the features start to shrink and more developers migrated towards more coder friendly software it will be bad news for them unless they decide to make changes.

I remember Hostbill forced WHMCS to speed up development, but lucky for WHMCS, while that software was good, the owner is a lunatic that can't run a business. Eventually people realized this and that competitor more or less was burned for its own mistakes and mental instability. But this shows that anyone can compete with WHMCS in a very short time if they go to sleep for a while. Blesta development is turtle slow in terms of new features, I guess that is why are not really hurting WHMCS. But they can complement that with external developers and vendors modules/plugins.

Edited April 11, 2019 by yggdrasil

[bear]

2 hours ago, Jafar Muhammed said:

I have chatted with Blesta team, and they said they get customers migrating WHMCS > Blesta every day.

They say that all the time, as one would expect when someone's asking about the product...ANY product. 
I often see people selling Blesta licenses on forums (along with complaints), so it's not all love and happiness. 😉 

5 minutes ago, yggdrasil said:

WHMCS will not do anything unless they feel competition is hurting their bottom line (income)

You mean like adding third party deals that gain referral income for the company? :P

Quote

As Blesta keeps adding more and more vendors, API services, and modules, and more developers code for Blesta, WHMCS will absolutely see its user base shrinking

The main reason they got any traction at all was because of the issues in 2013 with WHMCS and security. The fallout from that gave them incentive and attention, since it was mostly open code and the flaws here were not. I'd have to say if they were going to push WHMCS down in the market, the time was then or just thereafter. The next chance will be soon, if they keep developing and WHMCS keeps getting bloat and harder to customize, along with even more onerous pricing and "marketplace" or mandatory SSL checks for no reason. Let's hope they learn before it becomes too late. 

[Kian]

54 minutes ago, yggdrasil said:

There is no way to stop piracy

SaaS can stop it.