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WHMCS Decade-Long Bait and Switch Complete
Hello all,
WHMCS just started sending out Emails to Owned license holders. We are 'encouraged' to 'trade in' our owned license for a monthly license. They offer a 25% discount, which isn't even for life.
Simply because they decided not to allow anyone with an owned license to upgrade.
And of course, this is for our protection and we 'asked' for this.
We reached the end, and the circle closed. 
Thanked by 1homelabber
Comments
The end is nigh.
Sounds like another TeamViewer lifetime license fiasco all over again..
You gotta squeeze all the money out of your investments any way you can. This is why I never buy anything as a lifetime purchase.
They must be hurting pretty badly if regular paying customers can't subsidize the cost of merely allowing you access to the updates.
Never buy perpetual license of anything, money doesn't last forever. It makes sense thousands 15 years ago doesn't help them run the new Dev now.
Not shocked. WebPros is garbage.
Thing is, they were charging yearly for support so they were still getting $50 - $60/year off us. They still had a healthy stream of cash.
Francisco
I don't disagree with you, I just have trust issues 😂😂
I don't trust software companies enough to buy perpetual.
For sure, I get that.
Francisco
But hasn't that been the policy since 2021?
Back in 2021, they said:
"You will not be able to purchase or renew support for your owned WHMCS license, effective immediately."
"If you do not have support for your WHMCS owned license, and you require product support or you would like to upgrade to a current version, you will need to upgrade to our standard license model."
Does php 7 have any major security issues yet because I see these for php 8 all the time https://nvd.nist.gov/vuln/detail/CVE-2023-3824
Yes, that's why 'Decade-long' is in the title. They started selling risky owned licenses for a high price when the company was young.
Then they sold out the company...
Only to slowly erode the value of the owned licenses during the next couple of years.
This should be illegal and I'm fairly sure they would lose in court if owned license holders would have the strength to do anything about it.
Especially since there are other examples where software owned licenses had to be honored in the end.
You can't sell a car, then 3 years later introduce a mandatory monthly fee for the same car, if the original contract doesn't mention it.
What were the owned licenses originally priced at, out of curiosity?
And they'll do this and likely raise prices for everyone again next year. And everyone (us included) will continue to pay until something comparable comes along with a very seamless and pain-free migration process.
Found this going back a bit;
This was around 2013
@Jord keeps promising me it's ready. 2 more weeks, he says...
Yeah, I mailed you the login details via USPS
If you want to give the 25% voucher to someone, please message me.
Why only 25%?
Get 75% from us
https://lowendtalk.com/discussion/188061/75-recurring-discount-shared-and-reseller-hosting-litespeed-jetbackup-and-more-from-5
That's the key right there, "pain-free". No provider with more than 5 years doing this wants to re-enter all that data. As long as the monthly is under $200 we'll all probably stick to it.
$300 one-time is cheap! I'm surprised they didn't jump ship on it a long time ago. I thought it was in the couple thou range.
the license is $100/m now. Let alone $300 one-time, those times passed, dev salaries are 10x now
Wait till Hostbill pulls something like this
Needed WHMCS license for my business.
OK, I see. Of course it's entirely acceptable to blackmail and f#ck one's loyal customers if one slowly cooked them and now only finishes them off.
How much more spitting in your face and pain do you guys need to come to the conclusion that you must do something about it? (And then hopefully drive that cancerous company into extinction)
But @raindog308 has a point: if you had +- 2 years and saw it coming, where's the alternative software created after many of you pooling money and resources ...
With 5keuro you cand find 2 developers and in 1 month you create a middleware to work with the existing whmcs database. Is not rocket science.
Whmcs with default setting will pull a table with 150 tld's in 4 seconds from the dB. A simple script in pure php care pull the same table in under 1 sec.
Whmcs code is bloated and fuckt up
hahahahaha proper developer to ONLY maintain new system would cost much much much more than $100/m
either way, if $100/m, or even $1000/m, for billing software that effectively manages whole business for you is a problem you should close down the business in the first place.
I mean the primary competitors are:
HostBill
Blesta
ClientExec
BillingServ
Etc.
HostBill has a (relatively) high barrier to entry
Blesta is good but imho doesn't scale as well and has small quirks to it that, imho makes it a little unintuitive.
ClientExec I've never used but I also don't see it as commonly used.
BillingServ I haven't actually tried-tried. I like it but iirc it's also a hosted solution.
In reality, WHMCS has a pretty solid cut of the market. Unless the team is very talented (I don't mean this by the development, but rather business development and/or growth strategies) I think it'd be very difficult to break into this market in a meaningful way. I've seen teams of amazing developers just... not get anywhere because they don't have anyone focusing on the business strategy part. For some, "just build and they will come" works. For something like this, you need a good business growth strategy and onboarding because you're asking them to entrust a core business logic/tool to your own solution.
You can add WISECP to this list. I've been using them for more than a year and they are affordable, usable. Their WHMCS importer is excellent 👌
And a few owned license plans...
WHMCS works if you have fewer clients at higher margins. I’m waiting for the day it changed to ‘per product’ instead of ‘per client’