There is a difference between making software more valuable and finding more ways to charge the people who already depend on it.  Unless you’re WebPros.

Before cPanel’s 2019 licensing overhaul, the cPanel & WHM VPS license was available for about $200 per year. The subsequent move to account-based licensing changed the calculation: instead of simply paying to license a server, customers had to consider how many accounts were on it.

Today, cPanel’s published direct-store price for Premier Cloud is $69.99 per month, including 100 accounts, plus $0.49 per month for every account above 100.  At 100 accounts, that works out to $839.88 per year. At 500 accounts, the monthly bill becomes $265.99, or $3,191.88 per year.  These are twelve monthly payments at the published rate, not discounted annual subscriptions, and they exclude taxes.

Using the old $200 annual VPS license as the baseline, those totals are approximately 4.2 times as much at 100 accounts and nearly 16 times as much at 500 accounts!

The distinction matters particularly at the low end.  Suppose a provider has 500 customers paying $2 per month, with one cPanel account each on a single licensed VPS.  That is $1,000 in monthly revenue.  At the published Premier rate, cPanel alone would consume about 26.6% of it, before paying for the server, bandwidth, backups, payment processing, support, or anything resembling profit.  That is an illustration, not an industry average, but it shows why an extra few cents per account is not necessarily a rounding error.

Under a flat license, making better use of a server spreads the software cost across more customers.  Under per-account licensing, the vendor collects more money as the account count grows, even without a price increase.  There is a perfectly understandable business case for the vendor.  There is also a perfectly understandable reason for the hosting provider to dislike it.  “Our revenue scales with your business” sounds rather different depending on which company’s revenue you are discussing.

Same story for WHMCS.  WebPros acquired WHMCS in June 2019.  Less than two years later, it discontinued the ability to purchase or renew Support & Updates for existing owned licenses, while honoring active support agreements until they expired.  Sure, you could keep using your owned WHMCS license, but you didn’t get any further updates – including security fixes! – unless you switched to monthly billing.

Pre-acquisition, annual Support & Updates cost was $99.95. Today, WHMCS’s published Plus self-hosted plan is $34.95 per month, or $419.40 per year, for up to 250 active clients.

So What Are You Getting for All This Extra Cost?

Not much.  Maybe nothing.

Sure, the software is still updated.  As integration APIs change, for example, WHMCS or cPanel changes.  If tomorrow there is a new PHP release, they’ll update and certify against it.

But that is all normal maintenance on a software product.  That’s just keeping their product competitive.  After all, if they stopped testing against PHP versions and new PayPal APIs, eventually the software would be incompatible and hence unsalable, so this work benefits WebPros as much as it does the customer.

So has the value increased anywhere near as much as the price and licensing complexity?  I don’t think so.  But maybe you do.  Either way, let us know in the comments below.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, 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, raindog308 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, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, 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.