WHMCS pricing increase - we all said it would come

mikho · April 2021

Hello,

We are writing today to let you know about some changes to our pricing and licensing that will become effective on July 1, 2021.

Since 2017 we have continued our mission to automate and scale our customers’ businesses, empowering them by delivering critical features and capabilities, and increasing the automation and efficiencies available to these operations. The growing extensibility of WHMCS means you have access to more products, services, and tooling; the continued expansion of the MarketConnect platform gives you instant access to resell services in a way that is convenient, seamless, fully automated, and streamlined.

Over the past 18 months, we have invested significantly in additional people and talent, with even more investment planned for 2021 and beyond. Our investment in the business is just one of the ways that will allow us to continue to deliver the market-leading automation platform for web hosting businesses and professionals.

We have big plans. We intend to lead the way in redefining how web hosting is bought and sold, including modernizing the end-user experience for traditional web hosting to better enable our customers and partners to compete in today's web hosting market. We will do this by delivering new user experiences, new workflows, and closer integration with existing products and services in the web hosting ecosystem.

We are excited to have you be part of this evolution with us. We hope you will continue to see the value that WHMCS delivers to your business and choose to leverage us as your partner in business automation.

Today, we are announcing changes to the price and tiers of licenses which includes the introduction of six new tiers for businesses with over 1,000 active customers.

Here is what is changing:
The Starter license will no longer be available for purchase. If you currently have a Starter license, we will upgrade you to a Plus license on July 1, 2021.

Once upgraded to Plus, your WHMCS installation will no longer display the Powered by WHMCS notice.

The Plus license remains the same as today with a client limit of 250 and a monthly cost of $18.95.

The Professional tier will now have a monthly cost of $29.95 and a client limit of 500.

The first Business tier will have a client limit of up to 1,000 and be priced at $44.95.

For those with more than 501 clients today, we will upgrade you to the appropriate Business tier on July 1, 2021.

All Business tier licenses include our Business License Support with Live Chat Technical Support and access to Priority Support.

Additional Business tiers are now available for licenses above 1,000 clients. The pricing for these new tiers is in the table below. To help provide further information and clarity, we've created a 2021 WHMCS Customer License Guide available at

https://assets.whmcs.com/customer-licensing-guide-2021.pdf

Keep innovating, building, developing, designing, and hosting, and know that we continue to invest to improve everyone's WHMCS experience.

We understand you might have questions, and we invite you to reach out to our Customer Service team. You can contact Customer Service by opening a ticket at

https://www.whmcs.com/submit-a-ticket

The WHMCS Team

WHMCS Customer License Pricing – Effective July 1, 2021:

willie · April 2021

How bad is this? What are the main alternatives to whmcs? Too bad the housin hosting industry can't get it together to replace this stuff.

kuroneko23 · April 2021

So :
3 USD (18%) increase for Starter,
0% increase for Plus,
20 USD (82%) increase for Pro,
1260 USD (3152%) increase for Business?

kuroneko23 · April 2021

@willie said:
How bad is this? What are the main alternatives to whmcs? Too bad the housin hosting industry can't get it together to replace this stuff.

Blesta?

Barkweb · April 2021

We have big plans. We intend to lead the way in redefining how web hosting is bought and sold .....

Can't wait to see what they have planned ......

seriesn · April 2021

At that price, HostBill looks so much more promising.

If you are on a budget, Blesta is awesome. So is @Jord and his BillingServ

Lee · April 2021

To be fair, it does not appear unreasonable. I mean if you have 2,500 clients and software that manages your billing, support, automated setup of services and so on. That works out at $0.03998 per client.

Does not seem unreasonable to scale.

As always, there are alternatives from Blesta to building your own.

It comes back to the whole cPanel debate that is getting old now. If you want to charge your customer $1 per month for an unlimited reseller, that is not cPanel's problem or in this case, WHMCS.

vyas · April 2021

@Lee said:

That works out at $0.03998 per client.

Below the proverbial "Nickel and Diming" threshold.

lentro · April 2021

I think the main concern should be that there might be a second price hike like cPanel...

Jord · April 2021

Oh and lifetime licenses https://www.whmcs.com/members/index.php/knowledgebase/333/Support-and-Updates.html

InceptionHosting · April 2021

Who would have ever imagined that hostbill would become the cheaper option?

Lee · April 2021

I doubt Hostbill will be cheaper for most though. They are min $600 up-front then $100 each year, $75 each for additional support tickets and although they call it "lifetime" any new features are not available in the version you buy, to get them you need to pay for a new licence. And yeah, they make sure to add new "features" each year to get you ponying up for another $600 as you won't get it otherwise.

InceptionHosting · April 2021

if you have or plan to have over 500 clients and plan to be around for more than 3 years hostbill is the better option financially and technically, anything more than 500 and you are crazy to use WHMCS going forward as it will double again next year no doubt, hostbill even do the migration for you at a 1-time fair fee.

edit: that said, I totally understand why no one will want to migrate existing systems, the pain is real.

Lee · April 2021

Yeah well, we will see how many move out of protest. Got my fingers ready for the count.

hostEONS · April 2021

I'm going to stick with WHMCS for a while, have support active till Jul 2022 (renewed in advance when they stopped accepting annual support renewal, added 2-3 of whatever support contracts were available at that time )

But by that time if there is another price increase will definitely switch if not, I may just absorb this price hike, as it's a major issue changing billing systems, as everything depends upon it, so many integrations, for some of them there might not be any easy upgrade path or option to easily switch, some of the softwares/panels that we use even may not have a module for the new billing system.

But still have bought Blesta owned license long ago, if some of the features that are still not available in Blesta if they are added will probably switch to Blesta

InceptionHosting · April 2021

@Lee said:
Yeah well, we will see how many move out of protest. Got my fingers ready for the count.

plural? lol

PureVoltage · April 2021

@lentro said:
I think the main concern should be that there might be a second price hike like cPanel...

200% this. Like someone else we renewed ours for 18 months after they screwed people over with Cpanel then dropped the yearly update options. Seen this coming.

Looks like it will be time to start testing other options once again. Thankfully we already have hostbill and Blesta.

hostEONS · April 2021

@Lee said:
Yeah well, we will see how many move out of protest. Got my fingers ready for the count.

That protest won't affect the company behind whmcs, just like cPanel as these lifetime licenses were hardly making them any money and now most of them will simply pay the hiked price, and only few are going to leave, they are still going to end up making more $$

But right now it';s like everybody wants to just milk the cow of hosting industry

deank · April 2021

Doesn't seem that bad.
My grocery budget had to go up by 20% last year.
And it is going to go up by another 20% this year.

Everything goes up. What's new?

I do feed sad about those on fixed wages though. Webhosting companies are better because they can just raise prices.

DataGizmos · April 2021

Inertia is a terrible affliction that most people have. 6 months from now, I'm sure the vast majority of those complaining on the boards will still be running WHMCS when they realize "moving is hard". Others will just assess the cost/effort including time to move and compare it to the cost/effort/time to get another client or the cost/effort/time of a price increase and decide to stay with whmcs.

So in the end, it will just be a repeat of cPanel.

hostEONS · April 2021

Well this isn't grocery where clients don't like to pay increased price for their hosting account every year, in fact they expect it cheaper every year

deank · April 2021

And who is to blame for such flawed mentality?

Hosts in my book.

hostEONS · April 2021

It ain't about who to blame (though it's the hosting companies themselves to blame for it) it's just that hosting cannot be compared with grocery.

Most of the companies will absorb it just like cPanel but still it just feels like being cheated, first selling lifetime license and also offering option for paid support/updates and then discontinue support/updates for the same product

Anyways this is how world works and as I said, will probably stick with WHMCS unless there is another price hike, but cannot trust them as same company is behind cPanel, whmcs etc... so I'm sure there will be another price hike very soon

deank · April 2021

You are right that you can't compared it with grocery.

One has to feed himself. Can't pay it? You die. No alternatives.

WHMCS price increase? Who cares. There are alternatives, and it won't kill ya.

Can't compare indeed.

Lee · April 2021

@hostEONS said: Well this isn't grocery where clients don't like to pay increased price for their hosting account every year, in fact they expect it cheaper every year

That is the fault of the hosting industry though. You can say WHMCS is or isn't worth the price paid as a piece of software. You can't say it is too expensive because I only charge my customer x or whatever. Not how it works despite many people thinking it.

It's like on the OGF when people used to complain that it was ridiculous a cPanel VPS licence cost $14 per month when the VPS only cost $3 per month, so cPanel even then at just $14 was a rip-off! That LE* mentality when it comes to cost.

willie · April 2021

Cpanel is fantastically complicated and is consumer facing so hosts don't have much choice about offering it. If their customers want it and are willing to pay for it, there's not much to decide. Whmcs is mostly host side and I don't understand what is so great about it. Yeah switching it's hard, but those not already on it should try to avoid it.

MichaelCee · April 2021

@Lee said: Yeah well, we will see how many move out of protest. Got my fingers ready for the count.

Just reposting something I said on OGF: I think it will probably be years before anything major happens in terms of big players switching.

MichaelCee · April 2021

I think if any part of you thinks you're going to switch your billing panel in the next 5, 10 years (to a specific panel) you should start the prep as soon as possible. The longer you wait, the more data you'll need to migrate, the more complex it will (arguably) be.

someshzade · April 2021

The end is nigh! Its time to get some blesta lifetime licenses.... do we have any good developer for blesta? I might need some changes to be done before performing the migration.

willie · April 2021

I think it will probably be years before anything major happens in terms of big players switching.

Are any "big players" using stuff like WHMCS? I thought WHMCS (and Blesta etc.) was a small-company thing. DO, Hetzner, OVH, etc. don't use WHMCS, to say nothing of high end operators like AWS.

Lee · April 2021

@SmallWeb said: Just reposting something I said on OGF: I think it will probably be years before anything major happens in terms of big players switching.

I know a few that are seeing a significant price increase that will force a move. Not what you might call 'big players' but big enough. I am sure @jarland mentioned somewhere he is looking at $299 a month for example. That won't work for his type of service. One other I know is then looking at the $849 tier.

Now usually I would say that if you have that many active clients you should be able to pay, but some are providing services that shall we say, don't pay that well, web hosting aside.

So although for many this is just another price hike to absorb, it will affect enough providers this time around that they will have to find a new solution.

WHMCS pricing increase - we all said it would come

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