New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Virtkick Ruined?
BOXCWebsites
Member
in General
If you remember Virtkick from the Indiegogo project to make an open source VPS management system like SolusVM. I recently visited the website to install it as a test and I get redirected to this new page with PRICING.
Yes. Virtkick will now take 15% of your profit made. Plus it is not self-hosted anymore.
Does anyone else like it still or is it still us 
Comments
That would be funny, starting a crowd funding project which promises us a free open source control panel and now charging a ridiculous 15% from a company's profit. I hope it's a misunderstanding and we're missing something here.
That's terribly expensive. Also, are they going to refund backers?
@Nowaker
Hmm can you not charge via whmcs and make the VM free in VirtKick.
From their blog:
"Cards on the table - Virtkick has changed. Firstly, the Virtkick core stays open source. Secondly, we’ve decided to go for a SaaS solution instead of focusing on a self-hosted one."
As for the pricing:
"We charge you for 15% of the revenue you make through Virtkick. We take care of payment gateway fees. Simple."
I can see that actually being Complex once chargebacks get in the mix.
Beurk. Will stick with Solus then!
It's still open source isn't it?
https://github.com/virtkick/
https://www.virtkick.com/blog/
core still opensource and they're only providing SaaS if you want to do it.
maybe @Nowaker would like to comment on this...
"Core" is a very generic word. They could open source something which is not really usable.
They could change it, as it's their software but this is not what people donated for. That's the real problem I think.
Yes, but can they get their money back? I dont think so.
There can still be a free fork from it.
Checkout https://spacepanel.io. It looks similar to VirtKick.
I'm interested to see how this would work in regards to the new EU VAT rulings. Is this something that VirtKick are going to handle on their side?
EDIT: Answered my own question from reading their blog. Sounds like they're going to do all of this on their side. Source
Of course, since they take care of payments, this is p art of the payments, including making sure the customer location is recorded as need3ed, etc. In that case, 15% which includes the payment processor fees might be worth it.
They will also have to make sure there are no chargebacks :P
Now if they'll just make it 30% and handle support tickets too, it only takes a marketing guy to run a company
That would be pretty humorous.
soo could you make $1 plans then to make sure their payments go trough and then send them an inn-voice trough e-mail for the actual service?
Do these Kickstarter projects every actually work out and do what they claimed to do without being crappy?
Wow good luck with that model especially now that the project has been backed under false pretenses. Really sketchy move.
In all seriousness, for anyone looking at this positively, I challenge you to go back in time here and find the reason me and Ryan moved Catalyst from VirtPanel to SolusVM (manually, for something near 8 hours straight). You do not want to be answering tickets with "I will get back to you as soon as my panel provider responds to my ticket." We did that, they went down for weeks and were MIA except for constantly posting ads to WHT while ignoring us.
If you want something done right, do it yourself, or at least know who is doing it for you extremely well.
I've backed two which worked out perfectly fine, the products were quality too..
It's hit and miss though, you do need to be careful when picking who to back.
I do like the sound of the new one, the free one is ok but you have to remember the developers spend a lot of time coding, etc they deserve some sort of wage
Certainly, and perhaps they should instead approach you for a licensing provider instead of taking payment from people's clients and hosting it themselves. You should approach them about that. A win for two parties.
You can totally sell licenses for something that isn't ioncube encoded. Every day cPanel proves that to the rest of us.
The best bit about their new approach is this "The Indiegogo backers will receive their perks as promised." so people who backed them still get what they back. Licenses might be another way they could expand, get the premium support / self hosted and they still get income.
Isn't that what the kickstarter donations were for?
Investments (donations) only last for so long:
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/virtkick-take-cloud-back
They are mainly for test servers, priority / bugs, choose supported OS, non copyright copies, etc. It's still free though on their github but they do need some recurring income.
Actually, that could work if done right, but, I fear this is a way to lock you in, not really to offer a service.
I guess I don't understand the outrage.
People gave money for the kickstarter and the code is available for free. (I'm assuming it's the complete code, which may not be the case). Subsequently, they will also offer it on a SaaS basis.
So...what am I missing? The SaaS service would seem to be separate from the code.
BTW, I thought VirtKick was the control panel but not a billing panel. So how on Earth will they really know what you're billing?
It is everything in one (billing, VM control, support ticketing). Concern is due to use of the "core" wording, which implies some features may not be available in free software version, whereas originally the project was advertised as a community-grounded open source one.
That said, virtkick is licensed under the AGPL, and they accepted some pull requests from other people, so if they release or even use any code on their server that is not also under AGPL, then they would face legal trouble. AGPL is a strong license, so this should include any software that they use to interact with virtkick, i.e. anyone should be able to duplicate whatever hosting system virtkick is running to collect the 15% charge, and if not then the people who submitted pull requests (and assumed license would be AGPL) can sue them.
The billing pannel was also promised with the crowdfunding and they now want to charge to basically anyone who wants to sell VMs using Virtkick.
Thats a good strategy to make money: first collect donations, then charge for the product itself.