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

[stormy]

Let’s go back on topic then. Who is developing a solution in-house? What’s your preferred open source ticket/help desk solution?

[MattN]

Like many, I am contemplating moving to another platform.  There have a been a few things with WHMCS that bothered me, but given I was only paying $99/year for updates (+ USD conversion), it was stuff I could deal with.

now, my cost is going to be close to $250/yr (+ USD conversion) for the same product that I already have, and own. 

However, being in Australia, it severely limits my choices - as WHMCS and HostBill are the only two providers who can I get readymade modules for my Payment Gateway provider using tokens rather than storing CC info in the db (I am using eWay and GoCardless for some customers), and my Domain registrar (Using SynergyWholesale).

Hostbill looks promising "on paper" and already has all of these modules - however, the less than stellar history, and the hideous pricing structure, not to mention the additional cost if I want to develop stuff to work with it that could be sold is a bit ridiculous.

Blesta is looking promising - and will definitely be keeping my eye on that once the Domain Management is finally released - hopefully then there might be possibility of getting some progress here....  the code looks well structured, and it's open - so that's a good thing..  but dev does seem to be a bit slower - but then potentially on par with what I am getting from WHMCS.

I have a few months before my support ends as it currently stands.

While I would hope that given the price I pay is more than doubling, that I would finally see some of the long standing issues being fixed, rather than WHMCS implementing stuff that I don't need (and I guess lots of people dont) like stuff that makes money for WHMCS such as MarketConnect, i know that is not going to happen.

 

Like others, I don't think it's right for WHMCS to capitalise on the number of customers etc that I have in my system, as it doesn't change the work required for them, whether I have 100 customers, or 100,000.  Unless of course, they want to actually be delivering better product - then I could understand it...  I did also notice that the changes included in 8.2 are all either MarketConnect stuff (that WHMCS makes money from) or stuff they are onsell services (which WHMCS could well be making money from anyways - such as the Validation.com stuff).

it's certainyly going to be an interesting few months.  Would love to know what other AU based hosts are moving to, have moved to.

[agentblack]

20 minutes ago, bear said:

He's actually just been biding his time waiting for the complaint threads to wander into being a  bit less on topic, then cleans up the things they don't like and closes them. It's already begun, predictably. 

He seems to only answer support tickets when he gets called out here on the forums.  How strange.   He does apparently have enough time to like one of his fanboy's tweets in reply to our continued request for a refund of monies that are not theirs..

 

Quote

We do not intend to provide the source code for WHMCS, nor issue refunds for a software license which will continue to function indefinitely, and with significantly enhanced functionality since originally purchased in 2013.
We will honour your current Support & Updates agreement, and will continue to provide security updates in line with our Long Term Support policy.

To be clear there is no abandonment occurring here; the WHMCS software continues to be active developed and maintained. Infact these pricing changes will enable us to continue to bring advances to our platform, maintain our position as the market-leader and deliver new tools to help your business grow in an increasingly competitive and consolidated business environment.

Our offer to refund your Marketplace points balance upon cancellation and closure of your accounts remains. Whilst I do hope you will continue to use our software, do let me know if you’d like to go ahead with the cancellation.

He keeps attempting to extort us, repeatedly.. The fact that he even thinks this is smart is appalling.   You really should review your comments with your Legal team before replying to a customer with an extortion request.  You want us to give up something that we bought outright to receive a refund of monies in a stored value account?  Our request has never been a refund for the value of the license we paid, our request has been for the value in the stored value account called Marketplace.  You keep confusing the two "John".   Our request remains, refund us monies from our Marketplace account since you can not and will not guarantee the service will continue to work in 5, 10, or 15 years once you terminate our support and updates.  This means you're taking money you know very well you will never deliver services against.

[agentblack]

18 hours ago, WHMUp said:

 I'll stay with WHMCS as new pricing model has no any bad effect to me.

 

........Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me ..............

[agentblack]

All the invited 5 star reviews.. I wonder how much WHMCS is paying people to lie in their reviews to counteract the colossal nose dive they took...  It's a shame that Trustpilot allows WHMCs to pay for positive reviews..

[MrGettingRatherFrustrated]

Hostbill is likely to be the only viable option for my particulat use case, I'm not likely to be affected by the price changes in the short term - my reason for moving is more to do with the behaviour of WHMCS and the ridiculously slow speed to implement any improvements.

In use I have simply found too many issues and bugs - then find out that some of them are over 5 years old and the outright obstructiveness of John in recording those as bugs and the utterly pointless feature request system.

Even simply things like adding the customers title so that in countries where welcome emails should be addressed to M. Customer etc rather than firstname lastname are blocked

IMHO the biggest two changes WHMCS need to make which is going to have the biggest long term improvement to the product are

1) An overhaul of the feature request system and for it to be managed by the development not support team - andactually implement what customers are asking for

2) Appointment of a product manager, who engages with customers on here and beyond  and a restructuring of the support teams role/resonsibilities, why on earth John as support manager seems to be the self appointed product manager and company spokesman is beyond me and he is clearly, from the comments on here, not the right person to be fulfilling those roles. Support should not be involved in product decision making, simply informing the number of tickets received for a particular issue..

[MrGettingRatherFrustrated]

16 minutes ago, agentblack said:

All the invited 5 star reviews.. I wonder how much WHMCS is paying people to lie in their reviews to counteract the colossal nose dive they took...  It's a shame that Trustpilot allows WHMCs to pay for positive reviews..

And some of them multiple times from the same person who has only ever reviewed WHMCS - call me suspicious but ...

[UnwilfulExpenditure]

 

1 hour ago, stormy said:

Let’s go back on topic then. Who is developing a solution in-house? What’s your preferred open source ticket/help desk solution?

Ticket/help desk I want something either in house and for all companies or a reasonably priced self hosted solution! I'm still looking myself - but hopefully someone has some good suggestions 

[UnwilfulExpenditure]

1 hour ago, MrGettingRatherFrustrated said:

Hostbill is likely to be the only viable option for my particulat use case, I'm not likely to be affected by the price changes in the short term - my reason for moving is more to do with the behaviour of WHMCS and the ridiculously slow speed to implement any improvements.

In use I have simply found too many issues and bugs - then find out that some of them are over 5 years old and the outright obstructiveness of John in recording those as bugs and the utterly pointless feature request system.

Even simply things like adding the customers title so that in countries where welcome emails should be addressed to M. Customer etc rather than firstname lastname are blocked

IMHO the biggest two changes WHMCS need to make which is going to have the biggest long term improvement to the product are

1) An overhaul of the feature request system and for it to be managed by the development not support team - andactually implement what customers are asking for

2) Appointment of a product manager, who engages with customers on here and beyond  and a restructuring of the support teams role/resonsibilities, why on earth John as support manager seems to be the self appointed product manager and company spokesman is beyond me and he is clearly, from the comments on here, not the right person to be fulfilling those roles. Support should not be involved in product decision making, simply informing the number of tickets received for a particular issue..

A support manager should be able to be corrected about being wrong without deleting the posts and editing his mistake out 🤣 

I own up to mine, I feel humility and modesty are important parts of one's character.  A lack of either is very unbecoming  which speaks volumes about their character 😁

[brian!]

1 hour ago, WHMUp said:

5 Invited reviews, with 5 stars rating, last 3 days at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/whmcs.com

there's a trustpilot link in the ticket replies isn't there ? that is what took the rating from less than 2 to the high 4's over the last couple of years (all of which has now been lost).... as part of the report that a group of us were writing about WHMCS and some of its staff, we studied those TP reviews very closely... especially those that had only reviewed WHMCS. *coughs*

we probably won't bother to publish it now (which is a shame as we had made good contacts within certain online news publications but hey ho) - WHMCS inflicted more damage on themselves than that report would likely have... and besides, we now know the management are deaf to criticism.... and we really like the idea of the Support access loopholes still being there that the staff are totally ignorant of, but are being exploited.

personally, I wouldn't give a 5 star review for someone doing their job, e.g solving issues... but that's just me... always remember, whether the score is 1.9 or 4.9 - it's still the same company with the same people.

1 hour ago, stormy said:

Let’s go back on topic then. Who is developing a solution in-house? What’s your preferred open source ticket/help desk solution?

there was a time here when to even discuss that would have been considered off-topic - what strange times we live in.

1 hour ago, MrGettingRatherFrustrated said:

In use I have simply found too many issues and bugs - then find out that some of them are over 5 years old and the outright obstructiveness of John in recording those as bugs and the utterly pointless feature request system.

I did try to warn you... 🙂

1 hour ago, MrGettingRatherFrustrated said:

Even simply things like adding the customers title so that in countries where welcome emails should be addressed to M. Customer etc rather than firstname lastname are blocked

going off-topic for a sec, one of the first hooks that I ever wrote was to tweak the content of the Your Info sidebar - it used to annoy me that the format was the same for everyone, but different countries display their postal addresses in different ways.... the coding itself isn't difficult, just time-consuming to create a format for each country... in the end, I never bothered to post it... although no doubt if I had, it would have become a $30 module from wsa a few weeks later. 🙄

1 hour ago, MrGettingRatherFrustrated said:

2) Appointment of a product manager, who engages with customers on here and beyond

where do I apply lol ?

1 hour ago, MrGettingRatherFrustrated said:

why on earth John as support manager seems to be the self appointed product manager and company spokesman is beyond me and he is clearly, from the comments on here, not the right person to be fulfilling those roles.

too many fingers in too many pies.... there is a correlation between his increased public involvement (especially elsewhere), Matt's disappearance (and muteness) and Infopro's removal keeping him in-check in this place... we can all see the results.

I think it would do him the world of good to have a year completely away from WHMCS, visit the real world and return with a fresh outlook - it won't happen as I suspect he believes WHMCS would fall apart without him being there... or maybe he fears the opposite lol.

2 hours ago, MrGettingRatherFrustrated said:

And some of them multiple times from the same person who has only ever reviewed WHMCS - call me suspicious but ...

they'd only be counted once anyway - neg or pos.

i'd love to know who this Dave from Morpeth guy is who has negatively posted 6 times - I don't think I recognise him from here, but he certainly does have a bee in his bonnet on this. 🐝

[bear]

4 minutes ago, brian! said:

too many fingers in too many pies.... there is a correlation between his increased public involvement (especially elsewhere), Matt's disappearance (and muteness) and Infopro's removal keeping him in-check in this place... we can all see the results.

He has his fingers everywhere, doesn't he. 😉

Quote

although no doubt if I had, it would have become a $30 module from wsa a few weeks later

Ouch, but so true. 

[steven99]

5 hours ago, chrisb2012 said:

Ticket/help desk I want something either in house and for all companies or a reasonably priced self hosted solution! I'm still looking myself - but hopefully someone has some good suggestions 

I would recommend SupportPal for a self hosted commercial option.  They have integrations for WHMCS and Blesta and others built-in.   Also branding is possible for additional fee.  Only downside is no mobile app.

[UnwilfulExpenditure]

14 minutes ago, steven99 said:

I would recommend SupportPal for a self hosted commercial option.  They have integrations for WHMCS and Blesta and others built-in.   Also branding is possible for additional fee.  Only downside is no mobile app.

Cheers Steven,  I'll take a peek! 

[Mark]

On 15/05/2021 at 8:55 PM, steven99 said:

I would recommend SupportPal for a self hosted commercial option.  They have integrations for WHMCS and Blesta and others built-in.   Also branding is possible for additional fee.  Only downside is no mobile app.

+1. SupportPal is great (as is it's support).

[altomarketing]

On 5/15/2021 at 8:36 AM, stormy said:

Let’s go back on topic then. Who is developing a solution in-house? What’s your preferred open source ticket/help desk solution?

We are using all almost all opensource solution ( no more monthly fees !!! ) :

If bot can not answer, we derive to chat,
If chat operator can not answer,  a ticket is opened.  We aim to avoid an email ticket asking how to configure pop3 or dummy questions

Telegram + Chat + Bot + AI  + Whatsapp integration = www.livehelperchat.com
Knowledge = bookstackapp.com
CRM  = ESPOcrm.com
Calendar = https://easyappointments.org/
Tickets (mail, facebook, twitter, integration)  = zammad.org or chatwoot.com ( we are not decide it yet )

Automatic Invoicing - Payments - Integration with servers... = we are still using whmcs 😪  ja ! 
we can not find a good solution yet, but we are migrating to wisecp hosting customers.

And if you are a pro developer,  integrate all them with apis using n8n.io (also opensource, of course)

[-M-]

Only one month left before the new pricing starts! 🤑🤑🤑

How are you coping? Did you guys already switch or made some other plans to migrate?
Just wondering, as this thread has been quiet for some time. Maybe everyone moved already? 😉

 

[cluster]

I'm not happy with WHMCS v8 and switched back to 7.10 ...
Since I have an owned whmcs license I will use it until the end of the world!
I don't care if there is no longer support for own licenses, so it's okay to me that annual payments for unusable updates are no longer necessary.

Have a nice day!

[Mark]

7 minutes ago, cluster said:

I'm not happy with WHMCS v8 and switched back to 7.10 ...

May I ask you why? We are currently running 7.8.3 and are planning to upgrade to 8.1 soon'ish.

[cluster]

1 minute ago, Mark said:

May I ask you why? We are currently running 7.8.3 and are planning to upgrade to 8.1 soon'ish.

too many bugs, missing parts in admin area overview & confusing, customer passwords cannot be changed by admin if required ...

[brian!]

16 minutes ago, cluster said:

too many bugs, missing parts in admin area overview & confusing, customer passwords cannot be changed by admin if required ...

that's a fair summary - you only have to take a look at the v8.2 beta changelog to see how many bug fixes are listed there... and just from memory, I know there are bugs, with CORE values, that aren't even on that list.

Edited June 2, 2021 by brian!

[Mark]

Thanks a bunch! We'll be upgrading to 7.10 and upgrade to 8.X at a later point in time.

[ravex]

On 6/1/2021 at 11:48 AM, MvdL1979 said:

Did you guys already switch or made some other plans to migrate?

We have migrated to Blesta!

[stormy]

I'm going to Hostbill, need to schedule some time for the migration. Not sure if I'll make it before the cut-off, but it's not a money question. It's on principle.

[cluster]

9 minutes ago, ravex said:

We have migrated to Blesta!

too much effort ... I am relatively satisfied w/ v7.10 and will continue to use it with my owned license until doomsday 😇

[ravex]

4 minutes ago, cluster said:

too much effort ... I am relatively satisfied w/ v7.10 and will continue to use it with my owned license until doomsday 😇

How is it too much effort? Have you even investigated it? The team at Blesta have taken lots of input from people and updated the importer to work with WHMCS, the software, 8.x. There are always helpful people on their discord, and during office hours the owner and other staff members are around too.

In my opinion, continuing to use WHMCS, the software, gives WHMCS, the company, the green light to do the same in the future, but next time they might just say that owned licenses are now cancelled, and if you want to continue to use WHMCS, the software, you need to pay monthly!
 

11 minutes ago, stormy said:

... it's not a money question. It's on principle.

Same here, our price was only going up a few dollars a month, but I felt that I could not condone the mafia like actions of WHMCS, the company, and so on principle migrated away! It is also a bonus that there are only three files, out of more than 9,000, that are encoded with Ioncube.