WHMCS, a popular publisher of customer management/invoicing/billing systems in the hosting market, announced today that they are discontinuing all support for owned licenses.
WHMCS has slowly ramped up pressure on legacy owned license users. First they stopped selling owned licenses in 2016, and then last fall they disallowed transferring (selling) owned licenses. In an email to users today (below) they announced that owned license users will not be able to purchase or renew support.
They also announced increased prices for WHMCS licenses (more details).
What are your thoughts? Do you plan to stay with WHMCS? In a market full of competitors, how do you see this playing out? Please comment below!
The email from WHMCS:
Hello,
We are writing to you to let you know about important changes to owned licenses. Today we are discontinuing owned license support. What this means for you and your existing owned license is as follows:
• Your WHMCS owned license will continue to function as it does today. You may continue to run your WHMCS installation using the owned license for as long as you would like.
• You will not be able to purchase or renew support for your owned WHMCS license, effective immediately.
• If you have an active support agreement with WHMCS for your owned license, we will continue to honor that support agreement until its expiration.
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. You can obtain a standard license by logging into the WHMCS customer portal (https://www.whmcs.com/members).
Keep innovating, building, developing, designing, and hosting, and know that we continue to make investments to improve everyone’s WHMCS experience.
If you require assistance with our standard license model and what license is best suited for you, we are here to help. You can contact Customer Service by opening a ticket at https://www.whmcs.com/submit-a-ticket
The WHMCS Team
This is also being hotly discussed in a LowEndTalk thread.
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A disappointing move by WHMCS. The thing is, they realize there are very few alternatives, so when you have all the power you can do things like this,
bye
“In a market full of competitors, how do you see this playing out?” – in such a market they couldn’t do that. But I don’t see a market full competitors. So they can get away with it.
Can you list lots of competitors for us, so we can look into them? I know maybe a couple. Actually – just one if I remember. Haven’t looked in a while. Luckily I just renewed a few days ago, so I have a year.
They may lose some clients, but with less support requests and more income from the people who are staying they probably will make a nice big profit on the move.
Here you go, Mark: https://lowendbox.com/blog/whmcs-alternatives/
Thank you
Back in about 2005 I used Clientexec for my very first hosting company (the first year was a spreadsheet, hah).
I haven’t used their package in years and years (as we moved to our own software built in house right from ClientExec) but back then it wasn’t bad. I bet it’s better now.
I had added this blog post in way back in 2019 to find the alternatives, you guys can refer to it:
https://www.hostnamaste.com/blog/top-10-web-hosting-billing-softwares-and-automation-platforms-for-web-hosting-providers/
Today I received an email from WHMCS that they increased the pricing from 39$ to 99.9$ :D
Goodbye. WiseCP is similar to WHMCS _ for this price it is below WHMCS … maybe there are still people who are looking for alternatives with many similarities. I’d rather go sell drugs that are believed to be able to cure COVID-19 victims hahaha
I think odoo community version
Could replace WHMCS with added modules
I will contribute what would have been my whmcs support cost to this end
WHMCS is an all-in-one client management, billing and support solution for … With WHMCS, you’re in control with a very powerful business automation tool.