Charging structure changes

[nabil]

Just got an email from whmcs that made my jaw drop. I hate to say this but you've just taken a giant step backwards!  For self hosting, the days of charging people by the number of client records for on premises hosting ended 20 years ago. Your costs are not impacted whatsoever based on how many customers we have!!!!!!  We keep old client records for a period of time and now you are going to charge us for holding them - bollocks. I had never considered switching before but you've just lost my loyalty.

[AgilitySquared]

5 minutes ago, nabil said:

Just got an email from whmcs that made my jaw drop. I hate to say this but you've just taken a giant step backwards!  For self hosting, the days of charging people by the number of client records for on premises hosting ended 20 years ago. Your costs are not impacted whatsoever based on how many customers we have!!!!!!  We keep old client records for a period of time and now you are going to charge us for holding them - bollocks. I had never considered switching before but you've just lost my loyalty.

 

Fully agree with this.

Pure money grabbing.

 

We are using the software, whether or not we have 1 or 1 million customers it places ZERO additional load or resources on WHMCS.

This is now exactly what cPanel have done, pure pure money grabbing. Very disappointed,

I will be leaving WHMCS and simply use my website to order and collect payments. Pity that this has happened.

Im still in shock to be honest

[Ithiel]

It's a bait and switch that screws over their most loyal clients.

Selling a lifetime licence with annual support, then discontinuing the support option to make people repurchase your product a second time on a subscription for exponentially more money is nothing short of fraud.

[skycomp]

I was amazed at this as well.

We purchased WHMCS many years ago and have continually paid for maintenance.  To get a notice that WHCMS is no longer selling support and forcing us to the new pricing model when we made the investment years ago I find is unbelievable.

I strongly feel that Owned licenses should still be supported and grandfathered in and available for support.   As Nabil points out we also self host and thus the amount of data in our database has no effect on WHMCS and it's materially changing the terms of the agreement.

I hope WHMCS reconsiders this move.

[Kelly]

Honestly this just puts them in a bad light. I could understand if they're innovating and adding features that the community wants this would be fine. But it took how many years to allow users to belong to/access multiple accounts? The features that are prioritized and worked on are revenue generators for WHMCS. One of the things that kills me every time there's an update is finding small bugs in things that I would think would be thoroughly tested before release.

If that email came out saying here's how they're innovating, improving, what to expect for new features in the next 6 months, and this is why we can't continue this pricing model it would be different but it didn't.

Edited April 6, 2021 by Kelly

[niels]

They went from 99/year down to 59/year and now to nearly 500/year. That’s pretty erratic.

I would actually be (somewhat) OK with a bait and switch, but this feels more like a panic move, which is worrying.

 

[AffordableDomainsCanada]

As of this afternoon I have tasked a member of our team to find a suitable replacement for WHMCS.

We invested in WHMCS during the early years and now we are getting screwed over and forced to pay more money for a product we already paid for and continue to pay for every year. 
 

We feel this move by WHMCS is going to cost them money rather then make them money

[BigFoot]

LIFETIME doesnt mean lifetime to WHMCS.

LIFETIME means 'until we need more money & decide to pull your plug'

We invested so early in a lifetime license, based on being sold by WHMCS staff it would NEVER expire.

That was a lie. Today it expired. This is what loyal customers to you get?  We are the ones who shelled out the money to support you in the early days, now you screw us over.

This is really bad. Shame on you.

Edited April 6, 2021 by BigFoot

[WHMCS John]

Hi all,

Thank your for sharing your thoughts on today's announcement, we are taking on board everyone's feedback. I'd like to take a moment to address a specific point here if I may.

Our license structure only considers active client accounts, which should be reflection of the number of customers currently actively involved with and being managed through your WHMCS installation. Older client records should have the "Inactive" or "Closed" status so would not be considered for the purposes of licensing.

Please don't hesitate to reach out to our Customer Service team with any questions about tiered licensing and how the changes on July 1st may affect you: https://www.whmcs.com/contact

[AALayer]

1 hour ago, WHMCS John said:

Our license structure only considers active client accounts, which should be reflection of the number of customers currently actively involved with and being managed through your WHMCS installation. Older client records should have the "Inactive" or "Closed" status so would not be considered for the purposes of licensing.

Well i guess this explains it.

 

Although the price increase, i have to be honest. Maybe it won't kill small hosts and medium ones, but for the large ones with more than 1,000 active clients, you guys became worst than the goverment with taxes. I would in a friendly manner suggest your team [and your highest responsible for the pricing], to re-consider or you will be losing a lot of billing platform hosting market share. You just making it easier for other softwares similar to WHMCS to crush you sooner or later.

Edited April 6, 2021 by AALayer

[wsa]

1 hour ago, AALayer said:

You just making it easier for other softwares similar to WHMCS to crush you sooner or later.

That it true right now Blesta and ClientExec is happy that whmcs did this now they going to get clients 

[charlottezweb]

Loyal/pleased customer since converting to WHMCS in 2006. 

Very disheartened by today's email.

From what I'm understanding, my costs are going to go up almost 500%.

I'm incredibly disappointed and hope there's going to be some re-consideration as the pricing isn't realistic for some use cases.

[chechorj]

Customer since 2016, and with today's email, loyalty seems to be only important to us (WHMCS Customers) and not to their CFO or who knows who came with this pricing scheme that doesn't apply to a lot of scenarios.

Our costs will be increased from US$39,95 to US$999,95 (2403% increase!!!). And well, no support was needed in all this years, and now, it looks like they will be charging us for a dedicated support agent for that price!

Hope, re-consideration is done....otherwise, the strategy looks like they will be getting the same revenue with less customers (loyal ones) 

 

[Gazza]

Admins have been busy deleting topics and comments. Each time I refresh another one is gone.  Truth hurts comes to mind.

been with whmcs for 10 year with an owned licence, disgusting how you treat customers and cannot be trusted. Shame on you

[Damo]

Apparently 'Never' doesn't mean never. 

[niels]

Technically "Never" applies to your current version. You're allowed to use your current version forever.  Of course no sane person would do that, as there's bound to be security issues that only get solved in future versions. That's why there was an Update/Support option that you could purchase yearly. 

Anyway, if WHMCS is short on cash I understand pricing needs to go up. But charging based on the number of Active Clients ignores the reason why someone might have a lot of Active Clients. In our case:

1. WHMCS allows only 1 currency per client, so to offer clients the option to pay in multiple currencies as they see fit we generate additional WHMCS Clients for them on-the-fly and move their service between them accordingly. (Note: they can distribute different services over different currencies. It's not as simple as activating one client and de-activating another.)
2. Due to the political situation in our original country of incorporation we're slowly moving clients to a new company elsewhere. Both companies have an owned WHMCS license and keep a full copy of all clients.
3. We try to support some good in the world by providing our service for free to NGO's. It's unclear whether Free (but Active) accounts are also counted, but I think they shouldn't. Just seems wrong to tax something someone does for free.
4. Similar to #3 - how about Clients that sign up but do not order anything (yet)? Or who get a full refund?

Perhaps most important to me personally: I'm worried about the measures WHMCS will take to enforce this new licensing. Its trivial for someone to simply mark their Clients Inactive and mark them Active again when renewal comes up. WHMCS will have to do all kinds of double-checking to prevent abuse. Something which I can just see wreaking havoc for anyone writing their own modules or customization's with the assumption that WHMCS works in a certain way.

 

[Ithiel]

8 minutes ago, niels said:

Perhaps most important to me personally: I'm worried about the measures WHMCS will take to enforce this new licensing. Its trivial for someone to simply mark their Clients Inactive and mark them Active again when renewal comes up. WHMCS will have to do all kinds of double-checking to prevent abuse. Something which I can just see wreaking havoc for anyone writing their own modules or customization's with the assumption that WHMCS works in a certain way.

The documentation suggests that it will automatically upgrade you to the corresponding plan, which means there is essentially a dial-home on how many active clients you have.

This also opens up a new vulnerability for WHMCS as well: junk user attack - where an attacker/spammer could create hundreds or thousands of junk client accounts in the targets WHMCS so that WHMCS hammers them with a stupid high bill for having too many accounts.

Just when you think WHMCS has enough security exploits - they go and pull this crap to add more >.<

[Webdomain.com]

@WHMCS TEAM Great time to increase your prices without even a warning or an announcement. Have you heard about the pandemic running around and impacting many businesses worldwide ?
We were loyal customers of yours, I feel now we are hostage. At best, milk cows.
I didn't agree with any new agreement but, still, I am not even able to download the latest version attached to my active license. 

Pathetic, greedy and very customer unfriendly. Time to move away.

[WHMCS John]

Hi all,

Thank you for your continuing discussion of our recent announcement.

We are reading all your comments and feedback here, and our Sales team are available to answer any questions you may have via https://www.whmcs.com/contact

With regards to security updates; our policy on this remains unchanged by yesterday's announcement. To summarise;

Security related updates for the minor version you last had access to, are still available free of charge. These do not require an active Support and Updates subscription and are available to download, install and run even should your Support and Updates subscription have lapsed.

[AgilitySquared]

Please explain how it makes sense to charge per customer in WHMCS in self hosted environment?

On a self hosted environment it makes no difference if we have 1 or a million customers.

 

Yes, if we using WHMCS in a SaaS environment hosted by you guys, then each customer places additional bandwidth, Disk Usage etc and in that scenario per customer charge makes sense.

 

I will be moving away from WHMCS as well as cPanel if this decision isnt reversed.

 

[brian!]

1 hour ago, Ithiel said:

The documentation suggests that it will automatically upgrade you to the corresponding plan, which means there is essentially a dial-home on how many active clients you have.

I would suspect it's a query of clients with active services, as opposed to just active clients.

[Damo]

Well that's different to the count I see when viewing the clients page. There's active clients with no active services and they're still counted. 
 

WHMCS needs to provide the method used to determine it so that we can prepare and understand this pricing change. 

[Ithiel]

38 minutes ago, brian! said:

I would suspect it's a query of clients with active services, as opposed to just active clients.

I would suspect you're giving way too much credit to WHMCS and their track record of blatant lack if quality control...

[bear]

1 hour ago, WHMCS John said:

Security related updates for the minor version you last had access to, are still available free of charge. These do not require an active Support and Updates subscription and are available to download, install and run even should your Support and Updates subscription have lapsed.

Until such time as the version is far enough out of EOL, at which time it will no longer receive even those. This is what only just happened with the most recent security issue regarding attachments. The patches were not provided for any version below 7.7. We were told to upgrade to get them.
That's what I believe will happen here as well, that we would reach that point, there'd be a security patch that will become needed, and then the bad news. Again. 
"We can't support old versions forever, upgrade or risk it all".

[SenseICT]

Quite frankly, I'm very disappointed that despite the fact you're continuing to support your product, you're actively choosing to piss off hundreds if not thousands of businesses, including my own, that purchased the owned license and paid the annual support as an investment in their own business, as well as to support WHMCS and the community.

This is a blatant money grab. If you were never going to honour your end of the deal, you should't have offered it to begin with.

I realise it costs money to build and maintain these products, but your integrity is what counts here the most.

Who's going to trust you to provide quality services when you rip the rug under peoples feet, and issue an 'effective immediately' so people close to renewal don't even get the opportunity to create an action plan on what route to choose.

You've lost me as a customer, permanently, and I'll never recommend WHMCS out of principle alone. I paid for, supported, purchased extensions, and even wrote and maintained extensions for WHMCS.

This is very much a 'I'm not angry, I'm disappointed and frustrated'.... please think about your community first - we're not numbers, we're people, and we deserve to be supported by those we support.

Matt