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Let me know when you starting building your OnApp integration - we're happy to help with anything we can. Minimum we can go over billing models, and favorite features from our clients.
Sure! Let's do that! We'll get in touch by email
Interesting that you put third party integration above your own development...
I don't think that they can give competition to WHMCS without spending 5 to 10 years in billing system development. First they need to develop their billing system. WHMCS is very big software with thousands of features. First give competition to modulegarden type developers then think about WHMCS ;P
Only Blesta is alternative.
Day dreaming is a bad habit.
Highly popular SaaS solutions for live chat, helpdesk and mailing (Google Apps, Amazon SES) are already being used by webhosts. And many of them send root/account passwords in plain text and ask new signups to upload their ID proof. Moreover SaaS products are available for CRM, accounting, software repos and even for communication within team members (like Slack). And what about trusting third parties to process credit cards? Lots of them use Skype for support and video conferencing. CloudFlare, if used with SSL is already being a MitM and has access to everything entered on your site. Three letter agencies have more motivations to spy on Skype and CloudFlare than a random billing webapp. Moreover WHMCS is closed source, so surveillance is very much possible.
So why does everyone freak out when it comes to SaaS web host billing? BTW, both WHMCS and Nukern are non-US companies.
WHMCS and SolusVM may be a bed of roses now, but do not forget their past and this too.
Another popular SaaS related to web hosting is ServerPilot. They advertise themselves as an alternative to both cPanel and Plesk, they do not offer DNS or mail hosting nor do they have a file manager or PHPMyAdmin out of the box and their "coach" plan is costlier than cPanel. Yet no one bashed them. There's even a WHMCS module for selling shared hosting with servers managed by ServerPilot.
The risk of price rise exists in every product. What happens if OVH starts charging for the 256 IPs and the 500Mbps bandwidth. What matters is how they handle it. Mandrillapp recently discontinued their free plan, but they provided enough time.
The whole "Nukern is costly when I have 8000 customers" is like that customer who says "I need unlimited hosting so that I don't have to pay more when I have millions of visitors". At the higher end of LEB pricing ($7/mo), 8K customers would earn a gross revenue of $53200 (taking away 5% as gateway charges) assuming each customer bought only one service. So $679/month wouldn't look humongous for such a host.
Every other SaaS product charges per user (mailboxes), per email (mail senders), per support agent (chat and helpdesk software) so it is only logical for Nukern to price it per client. In 2015 when EU introduced new VAT rules, a very popular host, who sells <$1/mo products said they have no problems paying it from their own pocket! On one hand members here bash anyone who starts a "need a free billing software" topic and on the other bash the pricing model of anyone who tries to build a billing software. And finally complain that there is no alternative to WHMCS.
VirtKick tried to crowdfund their product which didn't turn out well. And I quote what Francisco said on WHT:
Suggestions for @Nukern:
As you already have modules for DO and Vultr develop one for Linode. Would be awesome if LunaNode is also added to the list.
Nice to see OpenStack, so how about Proxmox VE?
Allow Bitcoin payments with Stripe.
Finally get your code audited by Rack911's Steven Ciaburri. He is *the* guy for finding exploits on web panels.
It has a lot of bells and whistles. If you don't need them then creating something better (i.e. just does billing and account creation/deletion, handles taxes properly, solid integration with accounting platform ...) would probably be feasible. If you need the the bells and whistles then Dewlance is right (5 years would probably be 1 person working on it):
By the way, when I worked in hosting (a long time ago!), the hardest part of billing was dealing with non-payers and exporting into an accounting system. I think something like Recurly, Chargebee or Chargify might actually cope better than WHMCS with an external hook to do account creation/termination for some hosts.
@Nukern - the video looks great
Would like to note that DET.io will be a new option (releasing in 3 weeks) for any hosting provider looking to offer:
Containers
Platform as a Service
One-Click Apps
Custom Applications
High Availability
Here's a quick preview:
Also @Nukern, we sent over an email if you guys were interested in integration (nearly 4 month ago) however we received no response.
@DETio,
Nice to see you again. Is this SaaS or self-hosted?
For our Minified Edition (SolusVM Alternative) - It is SaaS for the panel. For our complete edition (the whole lot, OnApp alternative) it is self-hosted.
What about its price?
Pricing & Features of editions:
The cost is capped at 64GB RAM per Node, meaning the max cost is $16/mo/node for the Minified Edition & $32/mo/node for the Complete Edition with no hidden costs.
Our pricing model is designed to allow providers with small hypervisors (8/16/32) GB ram not have to pay as much as providers that use E5's with 128/256GB ram per node.
32 USD per month, per node, with a capped cost at 64GB RAM?
Not going to work.
You're doing it identically to Virtkick and it didn't work at all.
For the Enterprise Edition, is the HA obligatory?
$32/mo/node is not very expensive for the complete edition, I will happily drop my price if you can find an alternative that can compete in terms of features with our complete edition & cost.
protip: you can't.
For bigger deployments, where $32/mo/node 'might' start becoming expensive - we can work with the provider to find a right match in cost under contracts.
HA isn't obligatory, however recommended and has minimal system requirements (unlike alternatives which require expensive infrastructure) -
I didn't say I could find a better pricing. Providers here do not provide HA, therefore, they wouldn't signup for such pricing per node. Imagine a tiny profit margin, divided by 10 nodes. Pff, there goes their profit to pay 320 USD for 10 nodes.
It's too much for this market niche. Not saying it's not a good pricing, it is, but not for this market niche.
I have a client that might signup with you, and I might do the whole setup for them along with help from your team, I assume?
Sure, one of the reasons we designed the minified edition was due to the LET community. The complete edition is meant for providers whom want to compete with AWS, Microsoft Azure, IBM Bluemix, etc. Where-as the minified edition includes features on the level of DigitalOcean (which is what we're aiming for).
Regarding a client that might want to signup with us, we're ready to manually launch the platform for clients in the next 2 weeks and will have our automated launcher ready by the end of the month.
I think you got me in Skype, not sure. ID: mrgeneralpt
Feel free to talk to me. I have a client who's possibly interested.
ok so the thread got derailed now with another product?
@DETio Hello Jonathan, I was reading about your product and came across your AngelList profile. Under achievements you've mentioned starting a hosting company "with a budget of $30.00 USD and generated $30,000 USD within 6 months"
Just curious to know what happened, did you sell the company?
PavHost right ? It seems like the service is no longer active.
No, this is back in 2014 when SolusVM had a nasty exploit and was compromised by Hackers causing us to go out of businesses. One of the main reasons we were motivated to build this platform.
Thanks,
Jonathan
I can not imagine if every day we have more than 10 new clients.
Guy says price $679 /mo, why not pay developers to create custom billing and of course have a full control over client data. And pay the developers $30 /mo for maentenance, so data store on own server. Anytime creating module integration.
I'm not sure of the word WHMCS alternative, because the WHMCS license is only $350 onetime, unlimited features, many developers, strong security. Within a few days, can get the integration module from external dev.
Agree with @Dewlance only blesta alternative whmcs, but CE also.
The maintenance could easily be $679/month for something that is a) complex, b) business critical c) reliant on a bunch of different external services/APIs.
i purchased one in codecanyon but still in dev, i will modify it and offer at 1 dolar per month.
only to pay the fixes i do.
It'd cost you a lot more to build such software.