Expected WHMCS price hike & killing of owned licenses: Where will hosting companies migrate?

vpsgeek3333

Those who offer enterprise solutions & cater to high end market are probably not going to be affected much by this as they will either eat the difference in costs themselves or easily pass it on to their clients by charging more. There is a good chance that they are already using a custom solution. But those who target budget (low end) market are going to be severely affected.

There are many in the budget market who already offer services at little to no profit in order to keep pushing the sales. There are may be less than 1% of hosts who are talented enough as developers or earn enough to afford a custom billing solution which performs minimal automation without all the bells & whistles present in mass used solutions. A vast majority consisting of sole proprietors & one man show companies will have to make the difficult decision of migrating to a competing solution

Blesta, Hostbill, WISECP, Clientexec & AWBS are some of the well known WHMCS alternatives available.

Which one out of those do you think will replace WHMCS?

ExonHost

We are working for own billing solution from last year.

yokowasis

Boxbilling FTW

seriesn

@vpsgeek3333 said:
Those who offer enterprise solutions & cater to high end market are probably not going to be affected much by this as they will either eat the difference in costs themselves or easily pass it on to their clients by charging more. There is a good chance that they are already using a custom solution. But those who target budget (low end) market are going to be severely affected.

There are many in the budget market who already offer services at little to no profit in order to keep pushing the sales. There are may be less than 1% of hosts who are talented enough as developers or earn enough to afford a custom billing solution which performs minimal automation without all the bells & whistles present in mass used solutions. A vast majority consisting of sole proprietors & one man show companies will have to make the difficult decision of migrating to a competing solution

Blesta, Hostbill, WISECP, Clientexec & AWBS are some of the well known WHMCS alternatives available.

Which one out of those do you think will replace WHMCS?

Those of us who has the owned version, at the very least, we might no longer be able to upgrade. Tbh, the current platform works just fine so unless some major issue occurs, it is what it is.

Most of the newer hosts here uses Blesta or likewise solution. If I have to go though the process of migrating everything away from whmcs, building a whole solution will be so much more easier.

bikegremlin

Hostbill is a more expensive ("premium") option.
If WHMCS don't rise to reach those prices, suppose many people will just stay with it. Migration is a hassle and a cost.

While cPanel has no real, top quality competition, WHMCS certainly does. So I'm not sure price hike is inevitable.

AC_Fan

Normal will almost certainly go for Blesta, if they do, with some going for WiseCP or some such. The more premium ones will go for HostBill for the integrations.

yokowasis

Does Hostbill support for downloadable product or License ?

FridayNightGamer

Blesta all the way.

willie

How many times are people willing to repeat the same mistakes? I'd go for something FLOSS come hell or high water. In the case of billing, there's not all that much any one site needs in terms of features, so there's lots of options existing or DIY. It's true that cpanel is harder to replace.

elliotc

There will be a huge cost for migrating. Even if someone provides professional and managed migration, it is still impossible to avoid the risk of future problems.

wdmg

@yokowasis said:
Does Hostbill support for downloadable product or License ?

Yes

yokowasis

@willie said:
How many times are people willing to repeat the same mistakes? I'd go for something FLOSS come hell or high water. In the case of billing, there's not all that much any one site needs in terms of features, so there's lots of options existing or DIY. It's true that cpanel is harder to replace.

Any recommendation billing that is FLOOS and not outdated ?

Apart from boxbilling (who has been resurected from the dead for years just recently), I can't find any other option.

vpsgeek3333

@yokowasis said:

@willie said:
How many times are people willing to repeat the same mistakes? I'd go for something FLOSS come hell or high water. In the case of billing, there's not all that much any one site needs in terms of features, so there's lots of options existing or DIY. It's true that cpanel is harder to replace.

Any recommendation billing that is FLOOS and not outdated ?

FLOSS looks great in theory but no such viable options exist for billing as a hosting provider. The closest alternative you will find is Blesta which is open source & can be easily modified to make it suitable for use case of every hosting provider.

vpsgeek3333

@AC_Fan said:
Normal will almost certainly go for Blesta, if they do, with some going for WiseCP or some such. The more premium ones will go for HostBill for the integrations.

It seems Blesta is going to get the majority chunk of those looking to migrate away from WHMCS & if Blesta play their cards wisely they can bag even some of those who target premium market. For that they will have to provide them premium features that they are looking for. Otherwise HostBill is going to take them away. Solutions like Clientexec & WISECP already have their loyal user base & they would also surely benefit from a WHMCS price hike but not as much as Blesta will do.

dartagnan

Blesta will be the new "queen billing app".

BoxBilling is nice to see it alive. Good for personal projects.

WiseCP can take advantage of the owner will want to play smart, adjusting the way is doing now.

willie

@yokowasis said: Any recommendation billing that is FLOOS and not outdated ? Apart from boxbilling (who has been resurected from the dead for years just recently), I can't find any other option.

I'd look on drupal.org or the ruby gem repo and see what is there. I know they have stuff like that but I haven't looked into specific packages. Truthfully I've never felt the need for one: several places where I worked implemented their own billing and it wasn't that big a deal. A billing system like WHM needs a ton of features because it has to fulfill the requirements of 1000s of different sites in a single package. Implementing something that handles just one site is orders of magnitude easier.

yokowasis

@willie said:

@yokowasis said: Any recommendation billing that is FLOOS and not outdated ? Apart from boxbilling (who has been resurected from the dead for years just recently), I can't find any other option.

I'd look on drupal.org or the ruby gem repo and see what is there. I know they have stuff like that but I haven't looked into specific packages. Truthfully I've never felt the need for one: several places where I worked implemented their own billing and it wasn't that big a deal. A billing system like WHM needs a ton of features because it has to fulfill the requirements of 1000s of different sites in a single package. Implementing something that handles just one site is orders of magnitude easier.

yet, we can't find even a single decent option. Believe me, I have tried. I am using the freaking (heavily modified) boxbilling for production ffs.

And yes, now I am stuck with it. Migrating a lot of customer to other solution is not something you can do easily over the weekend.

chocolateshirt

I don't believe you will find it for free.. Nobody willing to develop something commercial for free.. The only solution is coding your own billing system..

willie

No idea if anything good is here: https://sourceforge.net/directory/business-enterprise/financial/billing/os:linux/

It specifically mentions this for hosting: https://sourceforge.net/projects/solidstate/

This also finds a lot: https://github.com/search?q=hosting+billing

yokowasis

@willie said:
No idea if anything good is here: https://sourceforge.net/directory/business-enterprise/financial/billing/os:linux/

It specifically mentions this for hosting: https://sourceforge.net/projects/solidstate/

This also finds a lot: https://github.com/search?q=hosting+billing

Nope. Most of them are irrelevant.

2nd Link is last updated last year, and the status is Alpha. Not even released yet.

We are talking about automation here, where people order, paid > the software contact WHM API, create the package, create the account.

Not to mention cron job, to suspend services, for unpaid invoices, and auto delete after x days. Now that is only CPANEL, it should also cater Direct Admin, PLESK, that's a whole lot more API.

And we havent talked about domain registrar.

yokowasis

@chocolateshirt said:
The only solution is coding your own billing system..

But, it's not free.

chocolateshirt

@yokowasis said:

@chocolateshirt said:
The only solution is coding your own billing system..

But, it's not free.

Well, if you coding it yourself then its free

wdmg

@chocolateshirt said:

@yokowasis said:

@chocolateshirt said:
The only solution is coding your own billing system..

But, it's not free.

Well, if you coding it yourself then its free

I’d disagree, time is a valuable commodity.

willie

@yokowasis said: Not to mention cron job, to suspend services, for unpaid invoices, and auto delete after x days. Now that is only CPANEL, it should also cater Direct Admin, PLESK, that's a whole lot more API.

If you mean it should perform the functions of cpanel etc., that's completely separate from billing. There is VestaCP and so on, nowhere near as powerful as cpanel but better than nothing. Yes obviously any billing system has to notify about unpaid invoices etc. It's not rocket science. Was there anything interesting in the github search results? Several repos there mentioned web hosting but I didn't try to evaluate them.

Considering that all these billing systems rely on MySQL, PHP, Linux, Apache/Nginx, etc. etc., all of which are free software far more complicated than a billing system, there's no serious obstacle to there being a FLOSS billing system, except for maybe the Windows-centric culture of parts of the hosting community.

Is there even a feature list of what something like this should do? Anyone think there is much hope of getting a kickstarter funded?

yokowasis

No, I am definitely talking about billing application. WHMCS CAN create package and account on WHM Server.The package and the account is created automatically by WHMCS.

We are not talking abour normal Invocing Software here. There are a lot of Invoicing software out there. You can buy it $25 for lifetime license and lifetime update on codecanyon. In fact some of your search result in some of those invoicing software.

We are talking about billing system that can interact with cpanel / directadmin / domain registrar API. The billing system that can Create Package, Create Account, and Suspend user automatically.

If it's easy to create such software, pretty sure there will be a lot of WHMCS Alternative sold on codecanyon for $50.

This is the very basic order on how whmcs works.

User Signup (WHMCS) -> Order Service -> Invoice Generated -> User Pay using paypal -> Invoice Marked as Paid -> WHMCS Contact WHM Server API -> Create the hosting package (if not exists) -> Create the user -> WHMCS Saved the generated cpanel username -> WHMCS Marked the service as active.

All of it, is done automatically with 0 admin interaction.

@willie said:

@yokowasis said: Not to mention cron job, to suspend services, for unpaid invoices, and auto delete after x days. Now that is only CPANEL, it should also cater Direct Admin, PLESK, that's a whole lot more API.

If you mean it should perform the functions of cpanel etc., that's completely separate from billing. There is VestaCP and so on, nowhere near as powerful as cpanel but better than nothing. Yes obviously any billing system has to notify about unpaid invoices etc. It's not rocket science. Was there anything interesting in the github search results? Several repos there mentioned web hosting but I didn't try to evaluate them.

Considering that all these billing systems rely on MySQL, PHP, Linux, Apache/Nginx, etc. etc., all of which are free software far more complicated than a billing system, there's no serious obstacle to there being a FLOSS billing system, except for maybe the Windows-centric culture of parts of the hosting community.

Is there even a feature list of what something like this should do? Anyone think there is much hope of getting a kickstarter funded?

chocolateshirt

TL;DR you want billing system that have auto provisioning module..

Basicly you could use blesta for free..

yokowasis

@chocolateshirt said:
TL;DR you want billing system that have auto provisioning module..

Basicly you could use blesta for free..

Well, free is not the same as floss.

I am still thinking there is no such a thing.

willie

TL;DR you want billing system that have auto provisioning module..

For vps I figured it would just use libvirt. For shared hosting you're saying provisioning is handled by the control panel, and the panels provide apis for that? Ok, call the api. Doesn't seem that big a deal. I'd be more concerned by handling different payment gateways and so on. Those packages out there already, do they use the panel apis? I can use blesta for free on buyvm, so maybe I can play with it a little.

yokowasis

@willie said:

TL;DR you want billing system that have auto provisioning module..

For vps I figured it would just use libvirt. For shared hosting you're saying provisioning is handled by the control panel, and the panels provide apis for that? Ok, call the api. Doesn't seem that big a deal. I'd be more concerned by handling different payment gateways and so on. Those packages out there already, do they use the panel apis? I can use blesta for free on buyvm, so maybe I can play with it a little.

Well, you make it sound it so easy. Yet still there is no floss alternative for whmcs

ialexpw

@yokowasis said:

@willie said:

TL;DR you want billing system that have auto provisioning module..

For vps I figured it would just use libvirt. For shared hosting you're saying provisioning is handled by the control panel, and the panels provide apis for that? Ok, call the api. Doesn't seem that big a deal. I'd be more concerned by handling different payment gateways and so on. Those packages out there already, do they use the panel apis? I can use blesta for free on buyvm, so maybe I can play with it a little.

Well, you make it sound it so easy. Yet still there is no floss alternative for whmcs

There have been past developments that have tried for this and they either end up going paid-for or they die due to either no outside contributions or the developer kills it off due to lack of interest/income. A lot of the auto-provisioning etc is not that hard to do, but if people are not being paid for it - why would they bother?

chocolateshirt

@yokowasis said:

@willie said:

TL;DR you want billing system that have auto provisioning module..

For vps I figured it would just use libvirt. For shared hosting you're saying provisioning is handled by the control panel, and the panels provide apis for that? Ok, call the api. Doesn't seem that big a deal. I'd be more concerned by handling different payment gateways and so on. Those packages out there already, do they use the panel apis? I can use blesta for free on buyvm, so maybe I can play with it a little.

Well, you make it sound it so easy. Yet still there is no floss alternative for whmcs

Well if you starting to create one, then there will be a floss alternative for WHMCS..