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

[ravex]

35 minutes ago, brian! said:

also, I think their terms have always been governed by English law, rather than US law - so that might make a class action case a little more complicated.

It doesn't make them complicated, it makes them impossible! It is not permitted to bring a class action lawsuit in the UK.

We do, however, have Group Litigation Orders (GLO), but you have to apply to the Courts for your individual case to be included in a GLO, and it is up to the Courts to decide if it is granted or not.

[WHMCS ChrisD]

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. 

[myautodj]

7 minutes ago, ravex said:

It doesn't make them complicated, it makes them impossible! It is not permitted to bring a class action lawsuit in the UK.

We do, however, have Group Litigation Orders (GLO), but you have to apply to the Courts for your individual case to be included in a GLO, and it is up to the Courts to decide if it is granted or not.

 

[ozgurerdogan]

18 hours ago, WHMCS John said:

Hi all,

Thank you for sharing your initial thoughts on today's announcement.

We are listening to the comments being shared here in the community and directly with us via https://www.whmcs.com/contact

Please don't hesitate to reach out to our Customer Service team with any question about how the changes on July 1st may affect you.

 

This is what I got after contact. I was only asking to allow last time whmcs update AT LEAST to latest version.

Quote

HI,

We are no longer able to generate invoice for Support and Updates.

This is a management decision and is final.

Best regards,

--
Kim
Customer Service & Licensing Specialist
WHMCS, Ltd.
www.whmcs.com

Customer Service is available:
Monday-Friday, 6AM-9PM BST

Before Directadmin control panel removed lifetime licences, they allowed clients to buy more lifetime licences till a certain date. But you did not even at least allow a day to renew renewal and update whmcs for user like me still using very old version and did not find time to update it.

 

[twikamltd]

Chris,

Do you consider a price increase of 85x to be reasonable?

Also on the new pricing, once you go 1 customer over 10k, your price goes from $249 to $849?

Can you just admit what's going on, which is a huge, greedy cash grab. I've never even heard of a price increase of around 8400% before. There is literally no justification for it, you know it, we all know it.

Edited April 7, 2021 by twikamltd
typo

[ozgurerdogan]

10 minutes ago, WHMCS ChrisD said:

Firstly, for existing licenses, changes to our pricing will not take effect until July 1st, 2021. 

But I am unable to renew by "Support and Renewal" to update to latest version.

[opso]

8 minutes ago, WHMCS ChrisD said:

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. 

Chris, even with one time product, using licensing module they are active. Anyway this is not the way to deal with loyal customer, I feel like you just show me the finger. My feeling though.

[ravex]

17 minutes ago, WHMCS ChrisD said:

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 ignore the majority of your comment, as I have already decided to migrate away from WHMCS and there is nothing but fluff and faux platitudes in it, however I do have one question.

As you are now making the support and updates cost, for owned licenses, the same cost as the monthly licenses. Will you now be releasing a non encoded version of WHMCS? Essentially, the software will be 100% open source, and we pay for support from WHMCS, the company?

Edited April 7, 2021 by ravex

[Plambee]

@WHMCS ChrisD

Everyone understands that price adjustments are necessary after a certain time. But the way WHMCS wants to adjust its prices is simply shameless.
A user with over 1000 customers used to pay $39.95, now he is supposed to pay $99.95 for the same service. That is more than a doubling, with what justification?
WHMCS only counts active customers, that is true. But if I, for example, offer a product with a one-time payment, where the product remains for life, then this customer costs me money every month without me earning anything from it.

The statement that owned licences remain valid is cheeky. Of course the licence itself remains valid, but at some point (with PHP X or security holes) the licence is no longer usable because you can't buy updates. Why couldn't they just adjust the price realistically? The 100$ per year for support and updates was really cheap and no one would say anything if it was 200$. But the fact that some users now have to pay 100$ per month or more is unbelievable.

 

[sonics]

i'm very disapointed about that decission and. it just ridiculous. we are whmcs customer since 9 years and they allready doubled the support price few years ago which was ok but now a price increase from over 450%....just mad.
i mean it's not a perfect tool at all but is very usable with a lot of little tweaks via hooks and lot of extension modules.

i just missing the words about that all!!

It's no problem to pay little bit more for the yearly support of owend license but not like they did it now!!

for us it would also be ok if we would pay for our owned license for support between 150-200$ but not more.

Edited April 7, 2021 by sonics

[twikamltd]

17 minutes ago, WHMCS ChrisD said:

allow Owned users to spread their software cost out over the year. 

You're allowing us to spread our $120 a year update payment over 12 easy monthly payments of $849.95?

That's really good of you, thanks guys!!!

[myautodj]

I think our friends at WHMCS are just wearing their masks too tight, you know the brain needs oxygen right?

It kinda looks like your taxing the bigger providers at a huge rate to help the smaller? They'll definitely need to raise prices it went from penny's each month to thousands, literally.

Edited April 7, 2021 by myautodj

[Kian]

1 hour ago, brian! said:

I don't think there is any functional difference.

🤔 well then what prevents me from using inactive clients as active ones?

[ravex]

9 minutes ago, twikamltd said:

You're allowing us to spread our $120 a year update payment over 12 easy monthly payments of $849.95?

That's really good of you, thanks guys!!!

Even the Mafia offers a lower percentage rate than that 😛

[ozgurerdogan]

After a stupid mail, your owned license it nothing valuable any more even a monthly license. Can not believe and go for alternative.

[eMiz0r]

1 hour ago, WHMCS ChrisD said:

Kia Ora Everyone,  

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. 

Ok so, this is practically the one and only benefit in return of the increased pricing. Which in return an average customer has to pay +$2/$300 a month. I'll leave the judgement to you, but I'm sure you agree with most arguments given. However, I do understand the chain of command especially in Private Equity space. There's nothing you can do. Management just decides and you have to carry it out. It's just what it is.

The only thing I don't understand is how WHMCS has been able to survive almost 2 decades with pricing maxxed at $39,95 a month (+ additional services) and how $44,95 all of a sudden became the minimum price for 500 clients or more. How can this be justified other then a plain and simple cash grab put to the extreme? I could even sympathize with a price increase of 200% to $79,95 for unlimited clients. This would mean WHMCS revenue would double immediately and given the fact no extra costs are being made, the business became more reliable for the future.

However, current pricing would increase WHMCS total revenue at least 4 to 5 times a year. And if that is the case, what do we get in return other then "business as usual and oh btw, you can now chat with us". Are you hiring a shitload of new programmers (lets say 50-100 at least) to fire up development so the ever growing backlog of future requests are finally being... developed? Is there ANY benefit justifying the massive increase?

[bear]

1 hour ago, WHMCS ChrisD said:

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. 

You can't be serious with this statement.
WHMCS will run until the PHP version no longer supports it, or some security flaw comes along that you won't offer a patch for, just like the most recent one. 
As for "spreading the cost out over the year"? Disingenuous at best. 
Bring consistency for users? You've got to be kidding. This is a money grab, and a way to finally do away with the folks that thought purchase of an owned license would get them actual consistency. Little did we know that the final objective would be to get all users paying far more, "consistently", for you. 

Disheartening, and I'm sure it's all falling on deaf ears, since any pricing changes here will likely be upwards, and not in favor of any "grandfathered" licenses. We're being "grandfathered" in the Eskimo sense...stuck on an ice floe to drift until it melts.

[dexus]

35 minutes ago, WHMCS ChrisD said:

We do understand that no one likes price increases, neither do we.

Really? So don't do it. If you must increase prices, for any reason, increase it for 50%, 100%, 200%, but not 8.000%, that is just pure greed, robbery, immoral and maybe even evil, I have to say.

I don't really have any reasonable explanation for this, and I believe that no one on this planet could really justify 3.000 or 8.000% price increase.

 

40 minutes ago, WHMCS ChrisD said:

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. 

You know this is not really possible. This is a web based application. If we do not have upgrades that mean that we do not have that software, since this is a web based application, and when next security issue is found we will not receive a patch. Right? That actually mean that we do not have that owned license any more, and that actually makes this owned license a *.

This is a web based software and we bought owned (lifetime) license with promised option to buy renewals, of course also for a lifetime.  We wouldn't buy owned license otherwise.

You could increase updates and support price for 50% or 100%, or even 200%, but 8.000%... I have no words for this.

[ozgurerdogan]

Whmcs must refund for all owned licenses if you force them for monthly basis.

[DGN39G8H]

WHMCS IS PROVING TO BE NOTHING BUT A PIECE OF SH*T * ARTIST COMPANY. WOW, WHAT A PATHETIC MOVE FOR A PATHETIC COMPANY. YOU WILL LOSE MY BUSINESS AND THE BUSINESS OF PROBABLY 50% OF YOUR CLIENTS. GREAT THINKING OF THE CEO, WHAT A RETARD.

[DGN39G8H]

1 hour ago, WHMCS ChrisD said:

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. 

Tell your "leadership" that they are ruining your company by doing this and that at least 50% of us will move to a different platform. And you'll likely lose another 25% after 20 more alternatives are created that actually respect their clients and don't * people.

[brian!]

48 minutes ago, Kian said:

well then what prevents me from using inactive clients as active ones?

nothing - but I can't believe that the active client count (in the licensing sense) is based solely on that.

[sonics]

make you review here: https://ch.trustpilot.com/review/whmcs.com

it's really a disaster such a customer relationship management. i still can't beleive it.

[UnwilfulExpenditure]

30 minutes ago, sonics said:

make you review here: https://ch.trustpilot.com/review/whmcs.com

it's really a disaster such a customer relationship management. i still can't beleive it.

Yes, I think everyone should make their feelings known on all the places they ask us to! 

[dh42]

For those of you in a similar position as me, with a lot of users that have never paid, you can use this script to connect to your api and set them to inactive. https://github.com/Dh42/whmcs-make-inactive/