If you run a hosting company (or any subscription-ish online service), you may be running WHMCS.  And you probably hate it.

The software itself is fine.  But the company is rapacious and constantly squeezes its subscribers for more and more money (thank you private equity).  At one time, you could buy a lifetime license…now you pay on a per-customer basis, with an annual price increase.

There are competitors:

• Blesta (get it free with a BuyVM purchase)
• ClientExec (get it free with a RackNerd purchase)
• BillingServ (a SaaS product run by LowEndTalk’s @Jord)

Of course, you could also roll your own, but you have decide if spending the time to develop, debug, and integrate a billing panel is the best use of your time.  You’ll likely conclude it’s cheaper to just pay a third party.

But what if you didn’t have to pay anything?

FOSSBilling

FOSSBilling is a free, open-source billing and client management platform (Apache 2.0 licensed) aimed squarely at hosting automation and related services.  You can use it for other things (like you can with WHMCS, et al.) but its heart seems to be in the hosting space.

FOSSBilling development began in 2022 and was forked from the BoxBilling project.  BoxBilling goes all the way back to 2010 but was no longer being maintained, hence the fork.

As it stands in 2025, FOSSBilling is not a WHMCS-killer.  But it’s gaining ground.  Like a lot of FOSS software, it’s been hitting all the low-hanging fruit first.  It’s still in beta but is under active development, with three release so far in 2025.

What are WHMCS’s Strengths and Weaknesses?

WHMCS has

• Wide adoption: if you need to hire someone to tweak your implementation or google for a problem, you’ll probably find a lot more answers about WHMCS than its competitors.
• Network effect: a mature ecosystem of modules and themes.
• Professional support: regular releases.
• Broad integration: nearly all domain registrars, payment methods, hosting platforms, etc. are supported by WHMCS.

But it also suffers from:

• Wide adoption: which means it’s a priority target for hackers.
• Egregious pricing model: with the screw turning ever tighter.
• Closed source: you can tweak a lot and write your own modules, but ultimately you’re limited to what the platform exposes.
• A More Restricted Config: for example, only Apache is officially supported.  If you use Nginx, WHMCS doesn’t promise to support your configuration.

And How Does FOSSBilling Compare?

FOSSBilling is still beta at version 0.7, so the future 1.0 release might have a different comparison.  But as of today, the pros are:

• Wonderful price: how can you beat free?
• Open source: you get access to everything.
• Basic integrations: not every platform is integrated but many are.  Whether it meets your needs is going to depend on what you’re doing (whereas with WHMCS you can pretty much assume it will).  But a lot of the big ones (PayPal, Stripe, etc.) are done.

And the cons:

• No support: it’s community forums or source diving at this point.  Hopefully if it gains enough marketplace adoption, some company can make a living supporting it.
• Weak ecosystem: they don’t have the two decades’ worth of people developing modules like WHMCS.
• Security: it’s beta, but everyone has access to the source.  So we’re back the classic closed vs. open question of which is more secure.  Worth nothing that FOSSBilling does not have 2FA support yet.

Note this from the FOSSBilling FAQ:

FOSSBilling was never intended to be a clone of WHMCS and doesn’t always aim to have feature parity with it.

However, they seek to serve the same kinds of users, so they’ll drive to roughly the same feature set.

Should You Use FOSSBilling?

At the moment, it’s still beta, and given that the billing panel is the nervous system of your business, probably not quite yet.  The project even says:

Keep in mind, that FOSSBilling is currently considered pre-production software. While we are working hard to make it production-ready, we do not recommend using it in production yet.

But it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on.  And rooting for.

raindog308

Raindog308 is a longtime LowEndTalk community administrator, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, Raindog runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, Raindog is a lover of German Shepherds, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.