Just got the email - going from $45 a month to $850 a month - What are you all migrating to?

[agentblack]

Oh but wait guys! You can still USE your owned licenses! Herpy derpy.. We're not taking AWAY your access to that license.

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We're just going to be greedy and lock you into a known buggy release and screw you until you give us more money.  Sound about right? Is that how the conversation went in the "board" room? Screw the customer, our VC overlords need to buy their 10th house somewhere.

How to destroy your customer base 101 here... Congrats WHMCS.. Hope yall go down in a flaming ball of fire as a result of this.

No justification, no reasoning, no purpose behind the termination of support and the massive price hikes other than pure greed.

[agentblack]

https://whmcs.istra.sh/

since Trustpilot seems to be removing reviews..

[yggdrasil]

51 minutes ago, agentblack said:

Oh but wait guys! You can still USE your owned licenses! Herpy derpy.. We're not taking AWAY your access to that license.

.

.

.

.

We're just going to be greedy and lock you into a known buggy release and screw you until you give us more money.  Sound about right? Is that how the conversation went in the "board" room? Screw the customer, our VC overlords need to buy their 10th house somewhere.

How to destroy your customer base 101 here... Congrats WHMCS.. Hope yall go down in a flaming ball of fire as a result of this.

No justification, no reasoning, no purpose behind the termination of support and the massive price hikes other than pure greed.

That is the idea! I'm surprised people are not aware why that investor group purchased cPanel and Plesk at the time, being competitors. And then also WHMCS. Isn't it very clear what they are doing?

They are destroying the small hosting provider market. Their goal is very simple. Leave all those smaller companies out of business so their other hosting/cloud companies can grow.

That capital group has one goal in mind. Leave most out of business or make it extremely hard for anyone to enter that market without spending chunks of money, money on them of course as they control the ecosystem.

If someone else makes a better WHMCS priced at a similar price, they are just going to purchase that product as well. People seem to forget things like H-Sphere or ModernBill. Its the same story every couple of years.

[agentblack]

4 minutes ago, yggdrasil said:

That is the idea! I'm surprised people are not aware why that investor group purchased cPanel and Plesk at the time, being competitors. And then also WHMCS. Isn't it very clear what they are doing?

They are destroying the small hosting provider market. Their goal is very simple. Leave all those smaller companies out of business so their other hosting/cloud companies can grow.

That capital group has one goal in mind. Leave most out of business or make it extremely hard for anyone to enter that market without spending chunks of money, money on them of course as they control the ecosystem.

If someone else makes a better WHMCS priced at a similar price, they are just going to purchase that product as well. People seem to forget things like H-Sphere or ModernBill. Its the same story every couple of years.

Well Blesta's CEO/Owner has come out and said in their discord that after this shady, under-handed tactics, hes never interested in selling to WebPros.  At this point, I hope Blesta takes off and becomes the market leader for the small to midsize market.  So far their support responds faster than WHMCS ever did/has and they actually engage with their community rather than making enemies out of them.

https://whmcs.istra.sh/

[yggdrasil]

26 minutes ago, agentblack said:

Well Blesta's CEO/Owner has come out and said in their discord that after this shady, under-handed tactics, hes never interested in selling to WebPros.  At this point, I hope Blesta takes off and becomes the market leader for the small to midsize market.  So far their support responds faster than WHMCS ever did/has and they actually engage with their community rather than making enemies out of them.

https://whmcs.istra.sh/

Maybe not WebPros but they could be sold to anyone in the future. Every other system did the same already, even Ubersmith. This is not the first time it happens, and it will not be the last time either.

As much as I like Blesta for being open, they could not even come up with a decent domain manager in more than 5 years. People are still waiting for basic features... 

It will take Blesta another decade to even reach close to WHMCS in terms of features if they continue this slow development path. What guarantee do you have this will not happen to Blesta? WHMCS broke more than one promise before. Nobody cares. WHMCS will continue business as usual. Maybe with fewer users, but maybe that was their goal in the first place, to reduce the amount of users or smaller companies and get rid of what they consider junk. WHMCS is trying to target a more premium audience, they don't poor customers anymore. And if we talk about medium size companies, they will not use this trash either. Nobody in their right mind will use a closed PHP script like WHMCS or anything similar again. No serious company will risk their entire customer base and services to another company.

Just pay the bills or move on. I already talked with people that can actually afford the new WHMCS pricing and all of them said they will not move based on principles alone and probably rolling their own solutions. Its not rocket science either. The chat module on WHMCS was always trash vs something like livehelper which is open source. Tickets? Same story, OsTicket is far superior. Its not as WHMCS has killer features. You can replace big chunks of WHMCS with free stuff which is better, more stable, open and secure. There are some things missing here and there but all products have API and database integrations to hook multiple products and softwares together.

Edited April 13, 2021 by yggdrasil

[bear]

25 minutes ago, agentblack said:

hes never interested in selling to WebPros

Until just enough money is dangled or something catastrophic occurs in either his life or the software. Mark my words, he'll break at some point.
Had you asked Matt in 2012 if he planned on selling, you'd have had the same reply. "No chance". Turns out there is one after all. 

[agentblack]

1 minute ago, yggdrasil said:

Maybe not WebPros but they could be sold to anyone in the future. Every other system did the same already, even Ubersmith. This is not the first time it happens, and it will not be the last time either.

As much as I like Blesta for being open, they could not even come up with a decent domain manager in more than 5 years. People are still waiting for basic features... 

It will take Blesta another decade to even reach close to WHMCS in terms of features if they continue this slow development path. What guarantee do you have this will not happen to Blesta? WHMCS broke more than one promise before. Nobody cares. WHMCS will continue business as usual. Maybe with fewer users, but maybe that was their goal in the first place, to reduce the amount of users or smaller companies and get rid of what they consider junk. WHMCS is trying to target a more premium audience, they don't poor customers anymore. And if we talk about medium size companies, they will not use this trash either. Nobody in their right mind will use a closed PHP script like WHMCS or anything similar again. No serious company will risk their entire customer base and services to another company.

I'd be interested in knowing how many support tickets owned licenses folks generated for them.. I know we didn't open tickets often, mainly because their support blows at best.. Usually had to hire a real support/dev person to fix their crap.  We were paying basically to receive updates and security fixes since the product is so broken.  I've talked with Kurt Daniels from Ubersmith and follow him on twitter.  He's a nice guy and seems to be doing well with Ubersmith.  not sure if he's the original CEO/Owner or if he's the replacement, but either way, he's doing a better job than WHMCS is at the moment.  STicking your fingers in your ears screaming WE CANT HEAR YOU!! doesn't make the PR nightmare go away.

1 minute ago, bear said:

Until just enough money is dangled or something catastrophic occurs in either his life or the software. Mark my words, he'll break at some point.
Had you asked Matt in 2012 if he planned on selling, you'd have had the same reply. "No chance". Turns out there is one after all. 

Yes, im sure, heck I'd consider it as well for the right amount, but I have a feeling Paul is a bit better than the pile of poo WHMCS has turned into..

[yggdrasil]

2 minutes ago, bear said:

Until just enough money is dangled or something catastrophic occurs in either his life or the software. Mark my words, he'll break at some point.
Had you asked Matt in 2012 if he planned on selling, you'd have had the same reply. "No chance". Turns out there is one after all. 

Well, at least if Blesta ever decides to pull this off, most code is open. Sure, they could decide to start rolling new changes with encoded PHP in the future, but people would start to see the writing on the wall at that point ahead of time. I knew WHMCS was going to do this when they started to slowly remove things from Smarty templates and put them behind PHP ioncube files. I have started multiple rants here about this. It seems I was not wrong after all. It was all on purpose, to lock people in. The biggest downside for me with Blesta is only features, not the software, it seems stable, secure and flexible enough for customizations. Its just the slow development that concerns me. Still no proper domain management features....

[agentblack]

1 minute ago, yggdrasil said:

Well, at least if Blesta ever decides to pull this off, most code is open. Sure, they could decide to start rolling new changes with encoded PHP in the future, but people would start to see the writing on the wall at that point ahead of time. I knew WHMCS was going to do this when they started to slowly remove things from Smarty templates and put them behind PHP ioncube files. I have started multiple rants here about this. It seems I was not wrong after all. It was all on purpose, to lock people in. The biggest downside for me with Blesta is only features, not the software, it seems stable, secure and flexible enough for customizations. Its just the slow development that concerns me. Still no proper domain management features....

domain management is expected very soon. According to their open dev tracking site, its nearly finished and is expected in the next release.

[yggdrasil]

3 minutes ago, agentblack said:

I'd be interested in knowing how many support tickets owned licenses folks generated for them.. I know we didn't open tickets often, mainly because their support blows at best.. Usually had to hire a real support/dev person to fix their crap.  We were paying basically to receive updates and security fixes since the product is so broken.  I've talked with Kurt Daniels from Ubersmith and follow him on twitter.  He's a nice guy and seems to be doing well with Ubersmith.  not sure if he's the original CEO/Owner or if he's the replacement, but either way, he's doing a better job than WHMCS is at the moment.  STicking your fingers in your ears screaming WE CANT HEAR YOU!! doesn't make the PR nightmare go away.

Yes, im sure, heck I'd consider it as well for the right amount, but I have a feeling Paul is a bit better than the pile of poo WHMCS has turned into..

Ubersmith did the same. It was something like $24 a month, then $50, then $99 then they decided to go to 10% of your profits. The product has not evolved in 15+ years after that. Most datacenters I worked, killed Ubersmith lately 2-3 years later and now have their own custom solutions. I wonder why... Maybe when you start to charge people based on number of devices, servers and their total profits, it just makes sense for them to develop something separated. Ubersmith then tried to backpedal offering again a $99 license, but it was too late.

[yggdrasil]

8 minutes ago, agentblack said:

domain management is expected very soon. According to their open dev tracking site, its nearly finished and is expected in the next release.

Remind in 5 years. Their forums show they started these 5 years. It has so many missing things it will take them 20 years to even match WHMCS unless they start to hire developers left and right which I suspect they can't right now. Hostbill on the other part, its one or two developer company, and they moved at the speed of light, I would never work with them again because the owner seems like a crackhead, but he certainly is a good developer. 

Unless Paul from Blesta decides to completely make this open source, so he starts to receive free help from other developers, or he takes a bank loan I'm not sure how quickly he can progress. I'm watching Blesta for years now, and it has hardly changed. Every new major release adds tiny features which I'm ok if it was at the same WHMCS level but it's not. Its lacking behind, in a huge way.

I'm sure it can and will work for 90% of the people, but some things I still can't replace with Blesta. I'm not saying they will not come, but I cannot tell customers to wait 5 years for something they have today. The reality is that WHMCS has no competitor and they are aware of it. Strangely WHMCS will put themselves out of that budget pricing based and its certainly not a premium product either. WHMCS quality wise is a poor product. But it was properly priced. Now its becoming expensive I don't see it becoming better either but the opposite with every new release.

Unless you have money to roll your own solution, it looks bad either way. People will not stay with WHMCS but they will certainly not move to Blesta either.

Edited April 13, 2021 by yggdrasil

[agentblack]

Devs can get free licenses from blesta though.  He welcomes it and encourages it.  Only a couple of files are encoded, the rest is open.  You may wish to have a chat with them on their discord.  We are testing the product now and will test HostBill soon. 

[agentblack]

aww, i musta hurt John's feelings. I'm on a moderated queue now.. how cute..

[ravex]

13 minutes ago, yggdrasil said:

Unless Paul from Blesta decides to completely make this open source ...

They encode a maximum of 3 files, every other file is released 100% unencrypted. Paul has also confirmed to me that as long as the code is up to their standard, and it benefits all of their clients, they will accept a pull request, and potentially merge it into the core code. It is not guaranteed, but then again that is something that even WHMCS did not even allow, as 100% of their files were encoded.

Quote

... but they will certainly not move to Blesta either.

Is that why Blesta has more trials active now than they have ever had? Is that why they have issued more developer licenses in the last week than they had in the 3 months prior? Is that why they have spoken to hundreds of companies that have migrated to Blesta? Because people won't migrate to Blesta!

Just because you won't migrate to Blesta doesn't mean others aren't and won't!

[yggdrasil]

22 minutes ago, ravex said:

They encode a maximum of 3 files, every other file is released 100% unencrypted. Paul has also confirmed to me that as long as the code is up to their standard, and it benefits all of their clients, they will accept a pull request, and potentially merge it into the core code. It is not guaranteed, but then again that is something that even WHMCS did not even allow, as 100% of their files were encoded.

Is that why Blesta has more trials active now than they have ever had? Is that why they have issued more developer licenses in the last week than they had in the 3 months prior? Is that why they have spoken to hundreds of companies that have migrated to Blesta? Because people won't migrate to Blesta!

Just because you won't migrate to Blesta doesn't mean others aren't and won't!

You got that wrong. I certainly have recommended Blesta as my first choice in the past and the main reason was that I was sick with how closed WHMCS is becoming.

When I said some will not move I was referring as now, or in 3 months. Maybe in a year or two sure... It really depends on how Blesta evolves from this point on. Free dev license is something WHMCS also has offered for test installations.

The problem is that those people cannot move to Blesta as today because there is no replacement for some specific things they need. And those that can code that solution, might seriously think on just rolling their own stuff instead of paying yet another product.

I remember when WHMCS first announced they would stop selling licenses and go full subscription. Tons of people moved to Blesta, at least I saw how this community and forums dropped exponentially in people active. But the product never really changed in a radical way. I like to go to their forums from time to time to see the activity and still has changed little or nothing. Paul seems very open and receptive to things, but then I see people asking basic things which are missing for years which is concerning. I feel he is still the only main developer behind the whole product.

Not sure if alone he can keep up.

Edited April 13, 2021 by yggdrasil

[Kian]

On 4/9/2021 at 8:21 PM, ThemeMetro said:

The goal of these changes is to affect mostly those businesses who can afford the change. 

Sorry for necro-quoting but I'd like to say something especially now that I saw your signature...

Quote

We could never be here without WHMCS !!

Thanks Team WHMCS

... and this announcement.

Basically you are suggesting that we are all a little bit ungrateful to WHMCS. Let me put things into perspective.

You can afford to thank WHMCS team for the simple reason that you have never been affected by their many inexplicable decisions and general immobility. Your job consists in creating templates. What could go wrong with that? Nothing compared to what companies like Modulesgarden, me or any other developer faces on a daily basis.

Have you ever invested 3 months of your time to figure out how to overcome a critical bug that exists from years? A bug that would take minutes to fix but WHMCS doesn't seem to care. Now imagine this happens every day and that on every new release of WHMCS you have to start over facing new bugs that adds up to old ones.

Do you think is normal that a company of the size of Modulesgarden is forced to face this sort of things on every major release of this software? I had shivers down my spine on every update since I was pretty much sure I had to re-test old bugs & workarounds and face new ones. Not to mention reinventing the wheel due to WHMCS discontinuing features to introduce new defective ones.

You don't know anything about that since you never committed yourself to coding modules on this platform. I assure you that is a painful experience. You can never sit down and have a normal day. There's always a new bug or a poorly designed feature to face. Templates don't give this sort of problems.

Just think about it. Where all developers gone? Why WHMCS has so many abandoned modules? Most devs moved to another markets. You can count the remaining few on the fingers of one hand and they keep disappearing.

That being said, now we have this massive price increase during covid and for no reason. Usually when companies increases prices, they explain you the reasons. What we have here? Nothing. Same bugs, same immobility, same attitude and the certainty that they will continue to ignore us. Thanks team WHMCS? I'll pass.

As for providers, they've been milked from years. First by Plesk then cPanel and now WHMCS. They can't even freely migrate somewhere else as WebPros will surely buy every competitor as soon as they become tasty. The only solution I see is looking for an open source & free software that doesn't exist yet.

Edited April 13, 2021 by Kian

[Mandalorian]

@Kian May you grow in "leaps" and bounds!

[Evolve Web Hosting]

2 hours ago, agentblack said:

domain management is expected very soon. According to their open dev tracking site, its nearly finished and is expected in the next release.

I'll believe it when I see it and get to test it. It's great they're finally doing something about it but I think it will be very basic at best. I hope I'm proven wrong. When we used it, customers were quite confused about how to use the portal and place orders without contacting us for help. Not sure if that's changed over the past couple of years or not.

I'm watching this one to see what their roadmap looks like over the coming months: http://hostingbilling.net/

[bear]

3 hours ago, ravex said:

Is that why Blesta has more trials active now than they have ever had? Is that why they have issued more developer licenses in the last week than they had in the 3 months prior?

Insider knowledge of what goes on at Blesta? Interesting. 

[bear]

3 hours ago, agentblack said:

aww, i musta hurt John's feelings. I'm on a moderated queue now.. how cute..

You're not alone, it seems. Some of mine are slow to appear also. 
Awesome. Really helping your image, WHMCS.

[brian!]

7 hours ago, bear said:

You're not alone, it seems. Some of mine are slow to appear also. 

your name will also go on ze list!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YMVPXmaKds

[ravex]

10 hours ago, bear said:

Insider knowledge of what goes on at Blesta? Interesting. 

No, it is called reading the public blog post from Paul!

 

[Evolve Web Hosting]

20 hours ago, yggdrasil said:

I feel he is still the only main developer behind the whole product.

I don't think he's a developer. He's more on the Sales / Marketing side of the company. His brother Tyson is the lead developer with two other guys they've hired (could be more that I don't know about). When their other brother, Cody, was involved, I felt like they were moving faster. He got a job offer with a large gaming company and went to work with them 4+ years ago. I remember when they did a refresh of the admin area look and feel from v3.x to v4.x and it took them close to a year to finish it. I think they're trying hard, there's a lot missing though.

[bear]

1 hour ago, evolve hosting said:

When their other brother, Cody, was involved, I felt like they were moving faster. He got a job offer with a large gaming company and went to work with them 4+ years ago.

Then that lends credence to the concern about him (Paul) some day getting an offer and selling off, if one of the devs "got a better offer" and was off to greener pastures. If one brother wasn't fully on board through thick and thin, well...

[yggdrasil]

8 minutes ago, bear said:

Then that lends credence to the concern about him (Paul) some day getting an offer and selling off, if one of the devs "got a better offer" and was off to greener pastures. If one brother wasn't fully on board through thick and thin, well...

Just my concern. It looks to me at least from the development side, that it's not their main priority. You don't take a year to develop a new admin interface. Or 5 years to develop a domain management page even if you are the only developer in house.

If his brother left, it means there was more money and future somewhere else...

Reading the feature requests shows how much critical stuff is lacking, example, they can't even do PayPal refunds if the amount is partial.