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WHMCS - OWNED - END OF LIFE - NO MORE SUPPORT!! - Page 2
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WHMCS - OWNED - END OF LIFE - NO MORE SUPPORT!!

2

Comments

  • WHMCS Limited has increased its total assets from 5 million (2019) to 7 million in 2020.

    Greed is infinite, however, and so in 2021 there will certainly be 10 million.

    In general, it must be said that WHMCS is legally in a gray area, for various reasons.

    On their website, Matt Pugh is listed as CEO...But he is not since 2019. Current directors (there are two) are KONZACK, Sascha Markus (Germany) and KOSTON, John (USA).

    I don't know the laws in UK as well as some others (bspw.Germany), but this could already be a violation, in competition law.

    A much more serious matter is the matter of own licenses. These keep their validity but a basic function/option is discontinued for the future.

    This is legally untenable and we can only advise any company that has its own legal department or uses an external lawyer to file a lawsuit against WHMCS,

    But also the price increase is not legal: WHMCS has something like a monopoly position and such price increases are not allowed.

    With which, in any case, WHMCS can also be additionally attacked: DSGVO

    WHMCS is a UK company and even after Brexit, the EU GDPR regulations apply to UK companies.

    The licenses are linked to the number of active customers, which means that WHMCS knows monthly how many active customers a company has. This is not only for competitive reasons an absolutely illegal thing, but also data protection law within the GDPR and the agreements with the EU (Brexit) NOT allowed.

    Here, every company that uses WHMCS and is located in the EU (especially in Germany) should immediately contact the national data protection commissioner.

    Perhaps a few companies can be found, within the EU! who together with the above points to take action against WHMCS.

    Yes, this will of course cost lawyer and court fees. But if you don't stop WHMCS now, they will keep doing it!

  • NickANickA Member

    @mailcheap said:
    Sigh, guess we're rolling our own then. I suspect most people need just a simple client/product, billing, and ticketing system.

    Open to going the FOSS route on this, let me know if anyone's interested in a collab along the lines of:

    • Minimal
    • Python
    • Modular
    • API-first design

    Pavin.

    If you're interested in going the Laravel route instead, I might be interested in sponsoring development, I would want a drop-in replacement for WHMCS though, no database migration required.

  • ddvuddvu Member

    Why no migration?

    But I agree, Laravel + PHP will be the easiest way. They are already making use of some of the laravel components anyways (eloquent for example).

    make it nice modern and modular design with api first design (as @mailcheap mentions)

  • ddvuddvu Member

    if you design it smart, you can allow others to develop plugins that can be added easy via composer.

    So you basically just provide a framework and the admin-panel (which will still be a lot of work though).

    Look at invoiceninja. Laravel based as well with modern approach.

  • LeeLee Veteran

    I will believe all the 'going to roll my own' comments when I see it. Every time, same comments, no action.

  • NeoonNeoon Community Contributor, Veteran
    edited April 2021

    They stopped selling new licenses in 2016 for 249$, i has been 4 + years since then.
    After 15 months, the license would be already paid.

    Afterwards the license was 1/3 of the price of a monthly license, so you saved a shitload of money.
    Of course people who recently got one, are fucked, no question.

  • SaahibSaahib Host Rep, Veteran

    Can do a crowed funding type of thing or monthly commitment, should start working on it once we have atleast 2 years funding for keeping developer.

  • jbilohjbiloh Administrator, Veteran

    @Francisco said:

    @jbiloh said:
    Not really impressed by this move by whmcs.

    Honestly this is better than what I was black pilling for the past while. I was fully expecting a flat "per active customer" like cPanel.

    Still, it's not great.

    Francisco

    It's going to creep in the direction of Ubersmith overtime. Costs will go up.

    WHMCS realizes there are few other options for what they offer and that comparatively they are still very inexpensive.

    They have the coverage provided by other larger companies who sunset software products (no longer providing updates/support/etc). Just the way things work these days unfortunately.

  • ddvuddvu Member

    @Neoon said:
    They stopped selling new licenses in 2016 for 249$, i has been 4 + years since then.
    After 15 months, the license would be already paid.

    Afterwards the license was 1/3 of the price of a monthly license, so you saved a shitload of money.
    Of course people who recently got one, are fucked, no question.

    Sure. A car is life-long when purchased. I can chose to invest money into it for repairs or upgrades for new features or just to keep it roadworthy.

    With closed source neither is possible.

    Thanked by 1drunkendog
  • lonealonea Member, Host Rep
    edited April 2021

    I have said it in another thread. If you have an owned license, the best way to move forward is to build a middleware/connector to connect a new frontend to the WHMCS backend using the API/hooks.

    This way you can hide your WHMCS completely without exposing any potential security risks. You'll also avoid running into another license situation from another software.

    Eventually you can add more and more functions you need and only use WHMCS as a recurring invoicing engine.

    This could probably be built relatively cheap, since you just interacting with parsing the API -> frontend. There isn't any SQL the developer need to worry about.

    Thanked by 1drunkendog
  • mailcheapmailcheap Member, Host Rep

    @NickA said:

    @mailcheap said:
    Sigh, guess we're rolling our own then. I suspect most people need just a simple client/product, billing, and ticketing system.

    Open to going the FOSS route on this, let me know if anyone's interested in a collab along the lines of:

    • Minimal
    • Python
    • Modular
    • API-first design

    Pavin.

    If you're interested in going the Laravel route instead, I might be interested in sponsoring development, I would want a drop-in replacement for WHMCS though, no database migration required.

    Thanks for the interest, I'm more comfortable with Python these days. PHP as a language has improved a lot with the recent updates, so it's just a personal preference.

    Plus, I can reuse a lot of the basic stuff like account/auth from the development of NMS.

    Reusing stuff from NMS would mean I can't make it FOSS unfortunately, sorry!

    Pavin.

    Thanked by 1drunkendog
  • ktkt Member, Host Rep
    edited April 2021

    You all hopefully bought ton of updates when they changed owned terms / increased price late last year :) It was coming from a mile away.

    https://www.lowendtalk.com/discussion/167281/whmcs-owned-no-transfers-allowed-and-no-12-month-support-packages

  • WHMCS has thousands of customers; Maybe it's time we all together AND coordinated to share our opinion on the price increase and the other bad news via ticket. When tens of thousands of tickets flood the system, this should not go unheard!

  • armandorgarmandorg Member, Host Rep

    @Internoc24 said:
    WHMCS has thousands of customers; Maybe it's time we all together AND coordinated to share our opinion on the price increase and the other bad news via ticket. When tens of thousands of tickets flood the system, this should not go unheard!

    The decision made was probably very well thought by their highest ranks. Meaning they probably predicted an outrage by the community which will fade in matter of months. They wouldn’t care or change their minds at this point.

    Thanked by 1drunkendog
  • FranciscoFrancisco Top Host, Host Rep, Veteran

    @jbiloh said: It's going to creep in the direction of Ubersmith overtime. Costs will go up.

    WHMCS realizes there are few other options for what they offer and that comparatively they are still very inexpensive.

    They have the coverage provided by other larger companies who sunset software products (no longer providing updates/support/etc). Just the way things work these days unfortunately.

    Yup, amen.

    Gets harder and harder for the summer hosts to get going. That's a good thing, but puts an unneeded pressure on the ones trying to do it right.

    SVM1 is coming.

    Francisco

  • Trustpilot: Oh, how the tide is turning.

  • I can say with a good authority that some large scale hosting companies (At least two) are looking to move away from WHMCS. They can indeed afford the price but with all the nuances WHMCS brings to the table, and the fact that WHMCS is now owned by OC and probably increase prices much more in the future, they are looking to implement their own solution.

    None of them are looking for something in PHP though. Only a panel custom built for their needs.

  • randvegetarandvegeta Member, Host Rep

    Why is it that I am finding this out here, and not via an email sent out to owned license holders from WHMCS directly?

    It now appears too late for me to get the latest updates.

    Greedy fucking bastards.

    Thanked by 2lentro Ticaga
  • lonealonea Member, Host Rep

    They did sent multiple. Your spam filter probably caught it.

    @randvegeta said: Why is it that I am finding this out here, and not via an email sent out to owned license holders from WHMCS directly?

  • ntlxntlx Member

    Kind of surprised no one in this thread has mentioned blesta yet. I'm not involved on the owner/business operation side of hosting anymore but when I was, we started using them, very good product in my opinion anyway.

    Thanked by 1Ticaga
  • @Internoc24 said:
    WHMCS Limited has increased its total assets from 5 million (2019) to 7 million in 2020.

    Greed is infinite, however, and so in 2021 there will certainly be 10 million.

    You seem to have mistaken what greed means.

    Taking life saving allergy medication from $7 to $300 is greed. Increasing the price of an ongoing service with support and features added is not even in same state as my example.

    In general, it must be said that WHMCS is legally in a gray area, for various reasons.

    On their website, Matt Pugh is listed as CEO...But he is not since 2019. Current directors (there are two) are KONZACK, Sascha Markus (Germany) and KOSTON, John (USA).

    I don't know the laws in UK as well as some others (bspw.Germany), but this could already be a violation, in competition law.

    What? You missed the part why for anyone who doesn't know wtf those people are.

    A much more serious matter is the matter of own licenses. These keep their validity but a basic function/option is discontinued for the future.

    This is legally untenable and we can only advise any company that has its own legal department or uses an external lawyer to file a lawsuit against WHMCS,

    But also the price increase is not legal: WHMCS has something like a monopoly position and such price increases are not allowed.

    Monopoly? What? That's by far the smallest "monopoly" I've ever heard. I'm curious on what authority can prevent price increases for something that isn't a utility or life requirement.

    With which, in any case, WHMCS can also be additionally attacked: DSGVO

    WHMCS is a UK company and even after Brexit, the EU GDPR regulations apply to UK companies.

    The licenses are linked to the number of active customers, which means that WHMCS knows monthly how many active customers a company has. This is not only for competitive reasons an absolutely illegal thing, but also data protection law within the GDPR and the agreements with the EU (Brexit) NOT allowed.

    Every public company has to list their active subscribers. I don't think this illegal in your thinking. This would apply to a million scenarios that are perfectly acceptable today.

    Here, every company that uses WHMCS and is located in the EU (especially in Germany) should immediately contact the national data protection commissioner.

    There's no personally identifiable data, so where is privacy or data violation?

  • @Internoc24 said:
    WHMCS has thousands of customers; Maybe it's time we all together AND coordinated to share our opinion on the price increase and the other bad news via ticket. When tens of thousands of tickets flood the system, this should not go unheard!

    The thousands of customers that can not afford the price increase but makes a lot of noise are exactly the customers that WHMCS wants to get rid of. They simply do not make enough profit on those customers, so by raising the price they cut the lower part of the customer base and increase their profit even if they lose a bunch of customers.
    It's a shitty way of doing business, but I totally get it. The only thing I really dislike about this move is that they simply kick the lifetime license owners straight in the face and laugh while doing it. Increasing price is one thing, but telling paying customers to go to hell is a completely different thing.

  • Hi Alejandro,

    Our Senior Management Team revised our Terms of Service and End User License Agreement (EULA) modifying the License Transfer Policy towards the end of 2020. Due to this, we now no longer allow the transfer of any type of license to another account. Following this change, holders of an 'Owned License' may no longer request a transfer of their license to a new owner.

    OK so just let them die

  • LeviLevi Member

    @dedicados said: OK so just let them die

    It's ok with them. You are no longer profitable for them and must be eliminated/amputated. They done that and the only who loose here is customer (you).

    Thanked by 2dedicados ntlx
  • coolicecoolice Member
    edited April 2021

    @rcy026 said:

    @Internoc24 said:
    WHMCS has thousands of customers; Maybe it's time we all together AND coordinated to share our opinion on the price increase and the other bad news via ticket. When tens of thousands of tickets flood the system, this should not go unheard!

    The thousands of customers that can not afford the price increase but makes a lot of noise are exactly the customers that WHMCS wants to get rid of. They simply do not make enough profit on those customers, so by raising the price they cut the lower part of the customer base and increase their profit even if they lose a bunch of customers.
    It's a shitty way of doing business, but I totally get it. The only thing I really dislike about this move is that they simply kick the lifetime license owners straight in the face and laugh while doing it. Increasing price is one thing, but telling paying customers to go to hell is a completely different thing.

    That is not correct small customers that need a lot of support will still pay 18.25 and if they pay 44 will have live chat and premium support.... (under 1000 clients)

    If you loosing on support you keep the annual renew fee to be profitable for the development and then the idea is to cut support and make it payed ($75 a ticket) so you cut stupid tickets (or make them profitable)

    They just want a cut from the biggest player business that is why they are doing that as biggest players had owned licenses ...

  • @coolice said:

    That is not correct small customers that need a lot of support will still pay 18.25 and if they pay 44 will have live chat and premium support.... (under 1000 clients)

    I was referring to the owed lifetime licenses that can no longer buy any kind of support or updates.

  • and I mean that if they have issues with support can change the renew to be for updates only and support to be additional pay ....

    A hosting provider that offers whmcs with reseller plans and have 50 customers all small (they will generate hundreds times more tickets tickets than ) one big customer

    but support is not the issue in my opinion they just want a cut which is greedy

  • JamesFJamesF Member, Host Rep

    if it was truly to do with support costs the owned licenses would be viable for life (with new updates) but support charged @ $75 a ticket, unless bug related.

    Truth of the matter, a lot of the big players probably had or purchased owned licenses and WHMCS wanted a piece of their pie. It's the quickest way for them to cash in.

    Instead of people paying WHMCS a reasonable charge for software they use like before, OAKLY want invisible shares in everyone's company, by changing their pricing, they can insure they make more money with less work, by profiting on your success.

    The more you sell, the more they make without having to do anything extra. It's not like they host your WHMCS and have to run a bigger server to serve your extra clients.

    The same goes for cPanel. You do the hard work and they cash in...

    I would expect all these fees if they ran and hosted the software, but they don't. They don't manage the clients. YOU do!

  • jhjh Member

    Forums like this that ban anyone using a nulled WHMCS must have helped them a lot with piracy. I guess a lot of people aren't going to care that much anymore, because, well, f!ck WHMCS. An interesting side effect.

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