Massive WHMCS price hike coming

[gei 7]

Guess this was long expected - might be time to start looking into alternatives. Like the greed happening with cPanel, I can see these becoming regular price increases.

I would no longer consider WHMCS a reliable partner. It will obviously be difficult to migrate away, but it would be prudent to keep your options open.

This would actually be reasonable if they had improved the product, but the only major changes I have seen have been the work they put into their 'marketplace' to push products upon our own clients.

Edited April 6, 2021 by gei

[stormy 13]

This is definitely hard to swallow. I wouldn't mind paying for a quality product and service, but this is "money for nothing". WHMCS is unusable out-of-the-box unless you add a ton of third-party modules.

As an example, it's been 8 years since we requested a system to send hosting renewal notifications:

https://requests.whmcs.com/topic/hosting-renewal-notices

Can you believe it? A hosting billing system that doesn't allow you to notify your customers of an upcoming renewal, nor lets them renew in advance! And these features exist since day one for domains. That's just crazy. There are many more examples like that.

[Max4444 0]

I agree with you, I will look to move away from Whmcs 

[yorkukhosting 2]

That explains why the recent updates renewal only allowed 6 months instead of the usual 12

[clopezi 0]

This it's a crazy increase.

Will this include inactive clients? 

[Varial 1]

I got an email stating support for owned licenses can no longer be renewed. Can continue using your install but must switch to the new pricing scheme for support/upgrades.

[yorkukhosting 2]

WHMCS Monthly 

9 minutes ago, stormy said:

This is definitely hard to swallow. I wouldn't mind paying for a quality product and service, but this is "money for nothing". WHMCS is unusable out-of-the-box unless you add a ton of third-party modules.

As an example, it's been 8 years since we requested a system to send hosting renewal notifications:

https://requests.whmcs.com/topic/hosting-renewal-notices

Can you believe it? A hosting billing system that doesn't allow you to notify your customers of an upcoming renewal, nor lets them renew in advance! And these features exist since day one for domains. That's just crazy. There are many more examples like that.

I think you may be correct... We have a bucket load of ModulesGarden modules to make WHMCS work but when you combine the annual cost of those plus new monthly fees for WHMCS the alternatives look interesting both in terms of cost but also a single source for the solution.

[UnwilfulExpenditure 65]

8 minutes ago, Varial said:

I got an email stating support for owned licenses can no longer be renewed. Can continue using your install but must switch to the new pricing scheme for support/upgrades.

What a awful way to treat long term customers!

[gijs007 2]

Is this for real?
I was angry that my owned lifetime license is no longer valid, and have to migrate to a monthly license. But if they also make these monthly licenses this expensive, I will stick with what I have now and look for options to migrate to another product.

[taenzerme 3]

This actually made me cancel both our monthly licenses.

As others mentioned I wouldn't have a problem paying more if service and features would be up par. But they are not.

Having too many problems and missing features in the last months this finally put the nail in the coffin.

[UnwilfulExpenditure 65]

Just now, taenzerme said:

This actually made me cancel both our monthly licenses.

As others mentioned I wouldn't have a problem paying more if service and features would be up par. But they are not.

Having too many problems and missing features in the last months this finally put the nail in the coffin.

Me too, I have a month to sort migrating! What a sad end to many businesses!

[Strolch 0]

WoW - 2 months ago I ordered extensions for 1K+ usd and now this! Funny what they mean by Lifetime License at WHMCS.  outrageous

[Bertie 3]

Currently on the business plan, only have around 1,300 active clients on there at the moment and it's going to be an extra $55 or so a month as we would need the "Up to 2,500" clients mark? Assuming I have read this correctly.

Edited April 6, 2021 by Bertie

[WHMCSbadMove 0]

For me, more serious than the price hike (which is outrageous) is the way they handled the message. No pre-warning. “Effective today”.

The minimum they could do was to allow us at least one more year of updates. That would not piss off so many of us I guess. 

Ok, I will just need to be faster to go with an alternative one and I know where I am going now: Clientexec. Their new version 7 (launching in 1-2 months) is VERY promising! And the timing couldn’t be better I guess: https://www.clientexec.com/coming-soon

I honestly don’t understand the hype about Blesta. I did two trials and the system looks so incomplete! The “client portal” was a mess. No ways to easily design it (unless you are an HTML guru. I accidentally deleted and I could never recover that first page.

I used clientexec for many years but I stopped 6-7 years ago. It is time to get another try with it. And with a $50/year support plan, who can beat that quality, price and support?

[bear 192]

6 hours ago, WHMCSbadMove said:

And with a $50/year support plan, who can beat that quality, price and support?

Looking back, that describes WHMCS' past. 😉

Quote

I honestly don’t understand the hype about Blesta. I did two trials and the system looks so incomplete!

Agreed. It's inexpensive and has mostly unencrypted code, which makes it attractive. It's been like 5 years since they began working on a proper domain system, and word is it's still not done. We won't be moving to that. 

[-M- 6]

6 hours ago, WHMCSbadMove said:

For me, more serious than the price hike (which is outrageous) is the way they handled the message. No pre-warning. “Effective today”.

The minimum they could do was to allow us at least one more year of updates. That would not piss off so many of us I guess. 

Ok, I will just need to be faster to go with an alternative one and I know where I am going now: Clientexec. Their new version 7 (launching in 1-2 months) is VERY promising! And the timing couldn’t be better I guess: https://www.clientexec.com/coming-soon

I honestly don’t understand the hype about Blesta. I did two trials and the system looks so incomplete! The “client portal” was a mess. No ways to easily design it (unless you are an HTML guru. I accidentally deleted and I could never recover that first page.

I used clientexec for many years but I stopped 6-7 years ago. It is time to get another try with it. And with a $50/year support plan, who can beat that quality, price and support?

v7. of Clientexec sounds indeed interesting. Didn't like the previous versions a lot. But given the many changes (e.g. order forms) and way better pricing (14.95 USD a month or 499.00 USD one time fee); makes this a real solution.  Especially given the very bad (new) pricing from WHMCS.

Luckily we only use WHMCS as an ordering system. Though we have invested a lot of time, effort and money in it. We recently cleaned old/inactieve users and we are now back at 600 accounts (could delete a further ~150 probably).
I think the price incrase is totally and completely absurd to be honest. However this happened also with Plesk, cPanel, SolusVM, XOVI and now with WHMCS as well. All suffered from (massive) price increases. For us the biggest change was with Plesk; depending on what items, the pricing increased for us anywhere between 400% and 800%. Absurd. Now the same is happening with WHMCS.

As you might know; cPanel, Plesk, SolusVM, XOVI and WHMCS all belong to the WebPros Group portfolio which is owned by Oakley Capital. Which is an investment company. And as you all know investment companies are not for charities and are only to earn quick and massive amounts of money. It saddens me to see more and more (previously) reliable companies being bought by Oakley Capital and being placed in their WebPros Group portfolio.

The hosting business is not so much fun nowadays; we receive (massive) price increases everywhere e.g. Plesk/cPanel and now with WHMCS. And on the other side; customers want everything as cheap as possible. If you charge them 1 USD/EUR to much, they will move. If you do not offer 24/7/365 support, they will move. No wonder a lot hosting companies are being bought by the really big ones and after a few months they increase their pricing. Ofcourse these companies make a decent amount of money as they;

1. use their own (in-house) developed software for hosting accounts, hosting servers, domain registrations, etc.
2. use their own (in-house) developed software for automated invoicing and account setup

So they are not paying for cPanel, Plesk, WHMCS, etc. because they do not use it. In the  meantime we are getting massive price increases over and over again (it seems to be the new trend). Plesk did it already in January this year, cPanel last year and WHMCS now. It's really becoming the new normal apparently.

But an investment company like Oakley Capital does not care about their customers. They are forcing price increases. However this will result in a lot of cancelations (as you can see in this thread already, on Webhostingtalk community and other related forums) or hosting companies who are going to quit 100% and sell their companies to the bigger players. As a result software like WHMCS, cPanel, Plesk will loose more and more customers and therefor money and when Oakley Capital sees this as well, they will probably sell all these companies to some kind of foreign company or dump it completely. It happened before in other situations and it will happen again.

We will see what the future brings, but it's getting more and more dark by these price increases in very difficult times....

[yorkukhosting 2]

HostBill seems like the most capable alternative, anyone have any experience of it?

[taenzerme 3]

In terms of alternatives I'll throw in WooCommerce.

We've been doing a lot of WooCommerce projects in the last years and always thought about migrating from WHMCS to WooCommerce. As we did all our hosting integrations for InternetX, LiveConfig (control panel) and Proxmox ourselves anyway it won't be too hard  to migrate that into some custom WordPress/Woocommerce plugins.

We already built a prototype using ACF Pro, CPT UI Extended, Admin Menu Editor Pro and AdminColumns Pro and are pretty surprised how good this all works. Especially since WooCommerce combined with Germanized Pro here in Germany does really work better in terms of privacy / DSGVO than WHMCS ever will.

Combined with ElasticPress, WooCommerce Custom Orders Table and maybe even WooCommerce Product Tables this should even work for larger providers. In fact I know one of our partners (50.000+ hosting clients) moved from Blesta to WP/Woo some time ago and is still happy with its custom solution.

It might sound a bit unconventional at first, and it's not for everybody. You definitely need to be able to code your own WordPress plugins. After some intensive testing in the last days I'm pretty sure all WHMCS can do can be done with Wordpress, WooCommerce, some premium plugins and some custom built plugins. And after all, it's all Open Source and not as much of a "lock-in" as WHMCS is.

 

[WHMCS John 215]

Hi all,

Thanks for sharing your feedback and thoughts on the expanded pricing structure we have unveiled.

For current leased license holders there are no changes today.

The updated pricing will come into effect in ~3 months for current leased license customers. This represents our first pricing change since 2016, and are pleased to maintain the Plus tier pricing of $18.95. With incremental changes for larger businesses who see the most value from our product.

If you have any questions or concerns about how these changes may affect you come July 1st, please don't hesitate to speak with our Customer Service team: https://www.whmcs.com/contact

[stormy 13]

How and why do larger businesses see more value from your product, John? Please enlighten me. Do they get better support? Do they get a better product with less bugs? Are you going to implement their feature requests?

[UnwilfulExpenditure 65]

5 minutes ago, WHMCS John said:

Hi all,

Thanks for sharing your feedback and thoughts on the expanded pricing structure we have unveiled.

For current leased license holders there are no changes today.

The updated pricing will come into effect in ~3 months for current leased license customers. This represents our first pricing change since 2016, and are pleased to maintain the Plus tier pricing of $18.95. With incremental changes for larger businesses who see the most value from our product.

If you have any questions or concerns about how these changes may affect you come July 1st, please don't hesitate to speak with our Customer Service team: https://www.whmcs.com/contact

To receive more non answers? 

[Jade D 3]

11 hours ago, WHMCS John said:

Hi all,

Thanks for sharing your feedback and thoughts on the expanded pricing structure we have unveiled.

For current leased license holders there are no changes today.

The updated pricing will come into effect in ~3 months for current leased license customers. This represents our first pricing change since 2016, and are pleased to maintain the Plus tier pricing of $18.95. With incremental changes for larger businesses who see the most value from our product.

If you have any questions or concerns about how these changes may affect you come July 1st, please don't hesitate to speak with our Customer Service team: https://www.whmcs.com/contact

What justifies paying $99 per month when I have already purchased the software outright, had to pay $99 for active support, and then had to pay thousands of dollars on modules to get whmcs to a level where it works as expected?

 

[nathany 2]

They're wanting to move to the perfect business model, take a % or someone else's business without the risk or hassle by being a faciliator/middle man.  The justification is presented as the cost reflects the 'value' to your business, where value is a synonym. Its much like Microsoft and the SPLA, you're making more money than we thought using our product so we want a cut of the action by tweaking the usage terms.

[stormy 13]

I’m ok with software priced by features, even by operator seat. Pricing software by MY profits? That’s crazy. It was bad enough with cPanel but at least cPanel is solid, fully featured, not buggy and with great support. I don’t think that describes WHMCS, quite the opposite. 

[nathany 2]

3 minutes ago, stormy said:

I’m ok with software priced by features, even by operator seat. Pricing software by MY profits? That’s crazy. It was bad enough with cPanel but at least cPanel is solid, fully featured, not buggy and with great support. I don’t think that describes WHMCS, quite the opposite. 

And there in lies the problem, maybe v9 will introduce an automatic 2% cut of revenue as that reflects the 'value' of the product? I joke but that is the kind of features I would fear be on the horizon - after all merchant fees exist so why shouldn't 'we' have that level of cut as 'we' provide the billing software.