WHMCS - The Opportunity Invision Might Just Miss

[FZ]

One of my sideline gigs is to sell website hosting to help me pay for the server that my Invision community needs to run on. To manage that side of things I opted to use WHMCS to help me with the billing and it's been fine. I also tried using the built in Invision Servers feature which does a similar thing and it integrated pretty well with my WHM/cPanel software. 

However WHMCS has now gotten greedy and they are now charging their license out based on the number of active clients each of their customers has. They are introducing changes on 1 July that have upset a LOT of their loyal customers, myself included. So I thought I would look at migrating my client base from WHMCS to Invision, but I see that there is a message in ACP advising that the feature is deprecated in 4.5 and will be removed in the next release. 

This is sad because there is now an active need for a good solution for web hosting billing and this might be a great opportunity for Invision to provide that solution. 

Maybe management can provide some input as to why they are removing it? 

[Steve Bullman]

4 minutes ago, FZ said:

One of my sideline gigs is to sell website hosting to help me pay for the server that my Invision community needs to run on. To manage that side of things I opted to use WHMCS to help me with the billing and it's been fine. I also tried using the built in Invision Servers feature which does a similar thing and it integrated pretty well with my WHM/cPanel software. 

However WHMCS has now gotten greedy and they are now charging their license out based on the number of active clients each of their customers has. They are introducing changes on 1 July that have upset a LOT of their loyal customers, myself included. So I thought I would look at migrating my client base from WHMCS to Invision, but I see that there is a message in ACP advising that the feature is deprecated in 4.5 and will be removed in the next release. 

This is sad because there is now an active need for a good solution for web hosting billing and this might be a great opportunity for Invision to provide that solution. 

Maybe management can provide some input as to why they are removing it? 

Interested in this. I now sell hosting on 3 separate servers so was looking for a billing option also, and noticed invision have stopped this. 

[FZ]

I don't know why removing this feature would be in their interest? Does it require much additional overhead to maintain? 

[Nathan Explosion]

 

[FZ]

Thanks for the link. Glad to hear that it will continue on in 4.6, but... if it were to become attractive to ex-WHMCS customers it might well become a really good option for IPS to develop further in future versions of IPS.

Lord knows WHMCS might be good at billing but as a CMS it is pretty awful, so being able to combine the great CMS here with server management is something that I think will attract new customers who are really fed up with WHMCS' attitude to its customers. See here. There is also a blog post somewhere on their site with a lot more comments but I can't find it right now. 

[Ramsesx]

On the site WHMCS it says "Trusted by over 35,000 customers in over 200 countries" 

7 hours ago, FZ said:

that have upset a LOT of their loyal customers, myself included.

IPS I smell a business opportunity. 

[Matt]

There's lots we can do, but we really want to focus on the things we're really good at, which is enabling discussion.

We have no plans to move into a hosting management market as it would require a lot of resources to compete an develop effectively.