WHMCS Price Hike! Plus Revoking Support for Owned Licenses!

Recently WHMCS sent out an email detailing pricing changes. It seems greed is a big factor in the tech industry. And running a web hosting network becomes increasingly more difficult as more and more providers put up their prices. In 2019 CPanel did a similar thing going from a “per account” pricing model to a “per user” forcing a price increase of thousands of dollars per month for many companies.

*I do think CPanel backed this up very well, introducing a very high level of support. Although I feel this is becoming less and less helpful. #businessmodel

WHMCS is a great piece of software and I would argue there is nothing around that would match it, so in a sense they have a monopoly on billing software that integrates with CPanel and other systems. WHMCS is also a piece of software that you store all your client records and link in payment subscriptions and everything else, so it becomes very difficult to consider moving away from this system, so you are really forced to do what they say or strip your business completely back.

If you have a 1,000 customers with a payment profile, imagine how difficult of a task it would be to move all their data and have each of them start paying through a different system. You would lose a lot of business.

Price Change Summary

To summarise this long email, WHMCS will now be charging you more if you have a lot of clients.

*They don’t actually mention what defines a client, you can have a client with no services if you are using the system as a part CRM, and you can have non active clients too. So what are they charging extra for?

Currently the pricing looks like this:-

So a standard price, paid each month. But soon, on July 1st, in less than 3 months, you will be subject to the new pricing model.

So what does this mean for you?

Well if you have a large number of users you need to find an additional $1,000.

And if you have very few customers, you can keep things at the standard price.

But it is just more pressure on hosting providers and actually this cost needs to be passed on to the end customer eventually, yes the price increase isn’t huge and what you pay is relative to the size of your company, but when you consider this model for various other pieces of software it is just yet another blow to web hosting providers.

*I just hope that they execute the change like CPanel did, back it up with some new features in the software and improve their support!

It is going to require some administration work for sure, making sure every account in your WHMCS installation is valid and is paying to be there. And this task is made difficult by the lack of bulk updating functionality around “Clients” in WHMCS!

Owned Licenses Support Revoked!

I feel this is kicking a company when they are down but WHMCS also decided to send out the news at exactly the same time that owned licenses would now not be eligible for support!

In the earlier days of the software we paid for a “Lifetime License”, “Owned License”, sounds great at the time, but what they didn’t tell us is that 3 years down the line we would be told “You can keep using the software, but you won’t get any support or any updates” basically. Usually that is okay if we are talking about a basic plugin for WordPress, but not a large billing system that integrates with many different providers, it is only a matter of time that other providers update something that renders this “Owned Software” useless and broken.

This is outrageous! And yet another example of how big tech companies just call the shots and force your hand at things, there is no compromise either “effective immediately”, how can we plan anything with “effective immediately”?

This is called “Software Abandonment”

Definitions of “abandoned” vary, but in general it is like any item that is abandoned – it is ignored by the owner, and as such product support and possibly copyright enforcement are also “abandoned”.

It was bad enough if you “owned” your license and then they brought in semi annual payments for “support and updates” at $80 each. It is not a great feeling to be semi forced to pay for these “support and updates” but we did.

Now WHMCS are saying this is not even available, you MUST switch to their price increasing pricing structure otherwise you won’t get any support or updates. And in doing so you must render the “owned license” useless. So what did we pay for? What do we own? It is ridiculous.

Is it viable to keep running on the owned license only?

Although WHMCS find some kind of loophole in software laws by saying “you can still use the software”, “but you just can’t have our updates” it is simply not viable to use your “owned license” anymore.

Firstly not updating software is going to cause a security problem, somewhere down the line you are going to run into problems.

Other software providers that WHMCS communicate with will be updating their software and eventually your “owned license” installation of this will break, this will take down your support system, take down the system that generates invoices and automates many server commands too.

So it’s not worth the risk in my opinion.

So this “owned license” software that we have been left with is simply not fit for purpose anymore, it is now actually a hazard which we paid a lot of money for.

Summary

WHMCS have released a pricing model that will hurt your wallet relative to the number of clients you have, it is most likely going to cost you more, but it isn’t going to break the bank.

But it is just another price increase that we have to deal with and it seems big tech companies have this long term business model where they get you onboard for little cost, get a large customer base, make themselves valuable to the business you create and then hike up the price.

You are effectively being forced but it is “okay” because they reserved this right in their terms and conditions they tell us.

I don’t find this completely ethical, it seems software companies who have good lawyers can do what they want, and hosting providers must adapt their business accordingly, and the end user/customer eventually will see a price increase in their own products/services.