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

[ozgurerdogan]

Can not believe WHMCS is still so quiet after all these posts.. They are definitely ignoring us...

[sonics]

me neither. no reaction at all from whmcs.

[ptoone]

There is now an email group for "Lifetime License Holders"

Send an email to join_whmcs@grouplist.io if you wish to be included.

Make sure it is from your whmcs domain as it will be checked.

[ozgurerdogan]

1 minute ago, ptoone said:

There is now an email group for "Lifetime License Holders"

Send an email to join_whmcs@grouplist.io if you wish to be included.

Make sure it is from your whmcs domain as it will be checked.

What for?

[AALayer]

1 minute ago, sonics said:

me neither. no reaction at all from whmcs.

Big companies don't have instant announcements, even if drama happens around they still valuate the current situtation with the team and probably have a board meeting within a few days/weeks if they are doing the right thing.

 

If WHMCS whatsoever has no reaction towards the recent community+net posts about price hike, their pricing has been well thought and they already knew and don't care about the consequences.

 

It's well thought strategy by them, meaning they will still increase their earnings even after some of you have moved along to another billing platform.

[UnwilfulExpenditure]

1 minute ago, ozgurerdogan said:

What for?

So they can give you more non-answers and tell you in a polite way to bend the knee or go away would be my guess

[bear]

11 minutes ago, sonics said:

no reaction at all from whmcs.

Based on history of unpopular changes like this, there won't be, at least until the initial anger has faded. Historically, Cpanel and WHMCS will allow us to beat our fists against the glass for a week or two, then quietly mop up the community. The only reaction you might get will be a brief and infuriating "announcement" about how this is needed to continue to bring great things to users, and keep improving our excellent support" and so on. It will likely include something about how owned license holders were getting a far better deal because the leased users were paying more, so to bring it in line and make it fair for those paying loads more (even if it's their own doing), we will force them to pay what you pay, even though they bought the whole thing up front.
Totally fair. Uh huh. 

[ravex]

36 minutes ago, bear said:

They sell for $300 on the Blesta site, owned unbranded. 😉

The owned unbranded requires a yearly payment of $39 for updates and support. The Owned Lifetime, which costs $750, does not require such a yearly payment. Basically, if you are going to be using Blesta for 11 or more years, then it is more cost effective to purchase the Lifetime license.

And Blesta strictly monitor the number of owned licenses sold, if they have sold a large number of a specific license, they will remove that license from sale while still honoring the commitments to their clients who have already purchased that license.

[ozgurerdogan]

11 minutes ago, AALayer said:

Big companies don't have instant announcements, even if drama happens around they still valuate the current situtation with the team and probably have a board meeting within a few days/weeks if they are doing the right thing.

 

**** big companies... we are the buyers. There are always alternatives. I think problem is here not price increase but their attitude..

[Kian]

19 hours ago, brian! said:

why? the ways things are going, the last one to leave at night can turn the lights out on this place... this will be just one of those situations that get discussed privately by those interested....

if a user runs a SQL query to set clients as inactive, what can WHMCS do?

if they write a hook that makes a new client inactive by default, what can WHMCS do ??

granted, if an account when from 15,000 to 248 some questions might get asked, but how could they tell 100% it wasn't a genuine change ?? answer in the short-term, not easily... perhaps with future versions...

besides they seemingly weren't actively chasing paying users who were using JS to remove the WHMCS branding link (not that will matter much in the future).

anyway i'm long past caring what WHMCS think about anything - they've conceded the moral high ground on everything.

The reason why I'm a little worried is that WHMCS could change they way they bill customers.

As we know, they base their revenue on the "Active" status. As more people realize that they can use "Inactive" status as the new "Active", WHMCS could start counting all customers including inactive ones. If they do that, I can still legitimately run the entire system with "Closed" accounts that will work exactly like "Active" ones.

With this huge price increase and the middle finger to "lifetime licenses", people are more inclined to circumvent the new pricing structure. I'm not talking about cracking the software but legitimate ways to make it work with low budget. One could even make it work exactly with 249 customers to ensure the license always costs 18.95 $ / mo.

If tomorrow someone releases such a script, it's game over for WHMCS as the vast majority of people will use it. As a reference, most of my customers will pay 3599 $ per year instead of 479 $ (+651% price increase). They're already looking for this kind of solutions and frankly I don't know what I should do. If you don't do it, someone else will. It's terrible from any angle.

Edited April 8, 2021 by Kian

[yggdrasil]

7 minutes ago, ravex said:

The owned unbranded requires a yearly payment of $39 for updates and support. The Owned Lifetime, which costs $750, does not require such a yearly payment. Basically, if you are going to be using Blesta for 11 or more years, then it is more cost effective to purchase the Lifetime license.

And Blesta strictly monitor the number of owned licenses sold, if they have sold a large number of a specific license, they will remove that license from sale while still honoring the commitments to their clients who have already purchased that license.

WHMCS was the same, same purchase price and around $50 a year updates. The problem is Blesta can and will probably change their pricing and business model in the future.

Is it still worth the purchase? Yes, because most of their code is open. At least you are actually investing in something and getting real code you can edit, and not purchasing software that is now worth 0$, like WHMCS because every person that has an owned license now had their total purchase price reduced to $0. Nobody wants this licenses anymore as they are basically obsolete now.

[ozgurerdogan]

All these reminded me old competitor awbs. 🙂 https://www.awbs.com/

[yggdrasil]

4 minutes ago, Kian said:

The reason why I'm a little worried is that WHMCS could change they way they bill customers.

As we know, they base their revenue on the "Active" status. As more people realize that they can use "Inactive" status as the new "Active", WHMCS could start counting all customers including inactive ones. If they do that, I can still legitimately run the entire system with "Closed" accounts that will work exactly like "Active" ones.

With this huge price increase and the middle finger to "lifetime licenses", people are more inclined to circumvent the new pricing structure. I'm not talking about cracking the software but legitimate ways to make it work with low budget. One could even make it work exactly with 249 customers to ensure the license always costs 18.95 $ / mo.

If tomorrow someone releases such a script, it's game over for WHMCS as the vast majority of people will use it. As a reference, most of my customers will pay 3599 $ per year instead of 479 $ (+651% price increase). They're already looking for this kind of solutions and frankly I don't know what I should do. If you don't do it, someone else will. It's terrible from any angle.

They can is not the answer. They will is the answer. I bet everyone here any amount of money that self-hosted licenses are going away in the future.

WHMCs wants to be a soft or Sales Force or Shopify solution. They are not interested in self hosted users anymore. It costs them too much support and they cannot properly vendor lock people that keep making changes to the software.

Their whole intention here is clear. Move to them to their own hosted WHMCS solution in the future. Eventually you will not be able to modify the files either, you will only have hooks and the API but no direct access to any files. This spells doom for WHMCS developers as well.

[wsa]

1 hour ago, ozgurerdogan said:

Can not believe WHMCS is still so quiet after all these posts.. They are definitely ignoring us...

It waste time poster or open a ticket because they not going to do nothing about it 

[yggdrasil]

13 minutes ago, wsa said:

It waste time poster or open a ticket because they not going to do nothing about it 

I suspect Blesta and some rolling their own solution. There are only 2 types of customers now, the ones that cannot afford their own solution, will go with something budget friendly. Blesta seems to be that today. And those that can't will probably roll out their own solution or why not, take Blesta and uses it as a core to develop something on top.

Edited April 8, 2021 by yggdrasil

[Mandalorian]

We ditched cPanel after their price hike.

Looks like WHMCS wants to repeat history.

Blesta it is!

[yggdrasil]

2 hours ago, ptoone said:

There is now an email group for "Lifetime License Holders"

Send an email to join_whmcs@grouplist.io if you wish to be included.

Make sure it is from your whmcs domain as it will be checked.

Why would they need to check my license to join a mailing group? Sounds like someone wants to know how many active installations exists....

[WHMCS John]

Hi all,

Thank you for sharing your feedback.

We are continuing to listen to all your comments being shared here in the community.

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

I also wanted to re-surface Chris' post from yesterday as it contains some important points for new viewers of the thread:

 

On 4/7/2021 at 1:00 PM, 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....

....

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. 

 

[wsa]

2 minutes ago, WHMCS John said:

Hi all,

Thank you for sharing your feedback.

We are continuing to listen to all your comments being shared here in the community.

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

I also wanted to re-surface Chris' post from yesterday as it contains some important points for new viewers of the thread

It waste time open a ticket because you not going to do nothing about 

[UnwilfulExpenditure]

1 minute ago, wsa said:

It waste time open a ticket because you not going to do nothing about 

Exactly- the platitudes here are simply to avoid the accusation of not saying anything! 

The tickets are the same copy/paste drivel offered  - new customers should checkout https://uk.trustpilot.com/review/whmcs.com for some very honest customer feedback! 👌

[yggdrasil]

Just now, wsa said:

It waste time open a ticket because you not going to do nothing about 

Agree. What for?

[isdoo]

4 minutes ago, WHMCS John said:

Hi all,

Thank you for sharing your feedback.

We are continuing to listen to all your comments being shared here in the community.

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

I also wanted to re-surface Chris' post from yesterday as it contains some important points for new viewers of the thread:

 

 

Sadly it is impossible to run the owned for an unlimited time. 

It will soon become insecure, php will need upgrading or third party plugins will need to be upgraded. 

I feel let down by you and the rest of the company after many years. 

I can't even manage to upgrade to the latest version, despite having an active package 😞

[UnwilfulExpenditure]

1 minute ago, isdoo said:

Sadly it is impossible to run the owned for an unlimited time. 

It will soon become insecure, php will need upgrading or third party plugins will need to be upgraded. 

I feel let down by you and the rest of the company after many years. 

I can't even manage to upgrade to the latest version, despite having an active package 😞

It's planned obsolescence to force you into paying for a service you purchased back when they sent begging emails to get users to buy 

[brian!]

3 hours ago, Kian said:

As we know, they base their revenue on the "Active" status. As more people realize that they can use "Inactive" status as the new "Active", WHMCS could start counting all customers including inactive ones. If they do that, I can still legitimately run the entire system with "Closed" accounts that will work exactly like "Active" ones.

oh I fully expect v8.2 to come in and out of beta before the 1st July and they'll have to find a new way to count "active" clients - the current way is ripe for abuse exportation.... when there is only a few dollars between levels (as now), then it's hardly worth the hassle - that won't be the case after July's pricing changes.

my mind is already pondering what they might do.... and thinking of potential theoretical countermeasures.... i'm struggling to think of a method they could realistically do that couldn't be got around.

the paranoid thought even occurred to me this morning wondering if there might be a "security" update, or hotfix, released for most recent versions before July... a hidden feature of which would tweak how active clients are calculated to bring it into line with v8.2 - but we're heading off into the realms of fantasy there (as said in a UK sitcom!)

btw - you should post that hook... the version I saw seems to solve the long-standing issue of showing hidden inactive clients by default.... WHMCS won't have an issue with WHMCS admins seeing all their clients by default and not just the active ones.

3 hours ago, Kian said:

With this huge price increase and the middle finger to "lifetime licenses", people are more inclined to circumvent the new pricing structure. I'm not talking about cracking the software but legitimate ways to make it work with low budget. One could even make it work exactly with 249 customers to ensure the license always costs 18.95 $ / mo.

we could have a fun afternoon thinking up all sorts of workarounds.

3 hours ago, Kian said:

If tomorrow someone releases such a script, it's game over for WHMCS as the vast majority of people will use it.

there's one in this thread already ain't there ? 🙂

one simple line of SQL could update all clients to inactive; a clientadd hook could auto set a client to inactive upon creation, and as long as the cron wasn't set to change it, they would remain inactive...

if I thought there was any point, i'd write it tomorrow - but this will surely be tweaked before July.... actually, if they had got all their ducks in a row first, they should have addressed this in the last release, and only THEN, make the announcement about the changes.

3 hours ago, ozgurerdogan said:

All these reminded me old competitor awbs. 🙂 https://www.awbs.com/

aah nostalgia! I came from whoiscart and WHMCS "generously" gave me a 10% refugee discount on an owned license back in 2013.... whoiscart didn't support Nominet, but WHMCS did.

1 hour ago, yggdrasil said:

Why would they need to check my license to join a mailing group? Sounds like someone wants to know how many active installations exists....

that did seem a strange condition to joining - ironically, if it's just to use the license checker to validate the email domain, then you could join that mailing list with a monthly leased license rather than an owned license!

Edited April 8, 2021 by brian!

[UnwilfulExpenditure]

2 minutes ago, brian! said:

that did seem a strange condition to joining - ironically, if it's just to use the license checker to validate the email domain, then you could join that mailing list with a monthly leased license rather than an owned license!

So they can do the hard sell when the ones not already capitulated are clearer so they may generate some extra dosh maybe? 

I couldn't begin to analyse the situation really, only a guess! I have very different thought processes to the whmcs team regarding the way my customers are treated!