Upgrades not free anymore?

[hbillclient]

Hi Guys,

It seems Hostbill is back again with there ever-changing tactics. Just now, I logged into my clientarea at hostbillapp and as I visited the Download section, there comes a pop-up with the following message:

"Note: Its been over a year since your owned license purchase. Your access to new versions expired.

To renew access to upgrades click here"

And guess what, I can't download the latest version anymore.

Funny, that the link to the "click here" takes me to their old clientarea:

https://hostbillapp.com/clientarea/?cmd=cart&action=add&id=35

I changed the url to reflect their current clientarea as:

https://clients.hostbillapp.com/?cmd=cart&action=add&id=35

and I get redirected back to https://clients.hostbillapp.com/index.php?/cart/&step=3

On the order page above it is listed as:

Services - 1 year of access to upgrades
Setup Fee $0.00 USD
Annually    $45.00 USD

So, all of a sudden they are back to the old annual upgrades or what? What does this include - upgrades, updates, bug fixes & support?

Can anyone else confirm this?

Thanks.

[hbillclient]

I have gone on and submitted a ticket to their Licensing Department regarding this and waiting for their reply. I also asked them to atleast include a bunch of free support tickets within the package if they are willing to charge for yearly upgrades.

Thanks.

[BRJP]

Hi,

I can confirm that its the same for me as well.

Do you use the Auto Updater within the Admin Panel?  Mine worked last week (not sure it will this week) so wondering why I don't have access to a license but can update by Auto Updater.

I have also sent a ticket to HB - did you hear anything back?

Brad

[BRJP]

Hi,

Kris come back to me and said I needed to purchase this yearly. 

To be honest, KBKP started this last year (Service Packs for Updates) but we forgot to complete the transaction! So we completed the £33 transaction today and all is downloadable again.

To be honest, although people feel this is a change to licensing terms, I am not against providing HB £33 per year to keep providing updates and upgrades.

Brad

[hbillclient]

Hi Brad,

Yes, the Licensing Department has confirmed that as well.

I haven't used the AutoUpgrade for a while but, it does seem HB have in the past week or so decided to restrict access to downloads/upgrades without yearly renewals.

Although, I have never paid any renewal/upgrade fee in the past,  I have still been receiving updates and all and I believe that has been the case with everyone else. It has also got to do with the fiasco due to their sudden change in their licensing policy in 2013 and they were forced to provide free upgrades/updates OR just ignore invoicing renewals in order to satisfy their angry clients. Now, since they feel that the tide has settled down it's time to start charging for yearly renewals.

Personally, I don't think anyone is against paying a renewal fee for the upgrades/updates every year. But, when they initially provided the licenses it had a renewal fee but, it was for both updates & support and now they have just resorted to treating them as seperate entities and charging them individually. They did not honor their own license agreement in this regard and that is the issue.

Support is an important aspect of any system and if Hostbill wanted to switch to the next level and attract only premium clients, fair enough but, not by cutting off communication mediums with their existing clients and charging insane $/per ticket for support. What they could have done was to prioritize tickets from their premium level clients/charge for instant support and leave the rest of the support medium as it was for others.

Hostbill has gone on from being a Client-centric system to a Business-centric system where now the emphasis is on businesses that can afford to pay huge $ to avail every aspect of their billing system including their support.

*Note: If anyone does want to pay for the upgrades, please do go for the Service Pack which atleast includes 1 free support ticket. You can avail the service pack from Hostbillapp website -> Support -> Service Packs.

Thanks.

[Datacenter1]

Hi All

I don't mind paying an anual fee for upgrades as long  all products/addons/themes are included but (and please correct me if i'm wrong) the upgrade fee is only for the core product with no addons included , if you want to update addons you have to pay a lot more

[hbillclient]

It is not exactly clear with their upgrade packs about what's on offer? It does give you an indication that we will get bug/security fixes for a year relevant to the license which would include the core, modules, order pages, themes, etc., excluding any new features for the same.

Maybe someone who has already bought the upgrade pack can give an insight on what's actually included and applicable.

[d4f]

I must say I'm surprised it took him that long. Basing a business model solely on selling new licenses and feeding free updates to existing customers is a bad idea especially if your customer base is comparatively small. The first indications of this new "era" already came last year with the "service pack" which was a couple of days later no longer required. 

Fun fact: My employer bought said "service pack" license which is due to expire in may. But like everyone else we are no longer able to get any updates with the same error message. Bugreport tickets concerning that issue (and around 90% of all our other bug reports) are simply kept open without response.

[d4f]

Update: at least with the subscription, updates work again.

I fully agree with @Datacenter1 though that updates should include module updates instead of having to separately purchase any updates to those.
That would make life easier for Kris too as he would only have to support one version of each module - provided we are finally getting good upgrade paths for the hosting modules...

[Datacenter1]

That would make life easier for Kris too as he would only have to support one version of each module - provided we are finally getting good upgrade paths for the hosting modules...

That is a good selling point!, or maybe two update packages:

For example:
Core updates only = 49.00/year
Full updates = 99.00/year

That would be a profitable and sustentable business model

[sysbitnet]

Hello Gays,

I do not know about you, but we are very disappointed with the HostBill platform. HostBill not include any new popular module, not create same innovation or change something fresh.

Not fix bug, we sent lot suggestion for bug, to create new module, to create same what other platform not have or have but nobody replay any of our suggestion.

We agree that there should be a normal to have price for an annual fee, and to have some form of communication with employees on hostbill.

I've spoken to the guys from WHMCS several times face to face, and accept any of our suggestion.

HostBill need to create public market , like WHMCS when developer can create same module what HostBill not plan or not wont or not like or not ...

[tallship]

Well, WHSuite is out of beta now and rockin' pretty good - Modules for PaaS and IaaS services are forthcoming:
https://whsuite.com

Many of us here at HostBillForums have been waiting for this project to go into production - and have been working with them since almost inception through beta. It's a good system and many of the features of HostBill's prior included modules are being actively developed for release into this product.

Part of the impetus for the creation of WHSuite was due to the malcontent with many HostBill licensees, and now, after promising (I'm not going to bother with screenshots or URLs showing it) no future fees for existing customers there are now new annual fees that were previously permanently wiped out via a hostbill press release - that's why no one has gotten that $45/yr invoice in a few years until just recently lolz.

So, one thing I've liked (as clunky and barely functional as it is) about hostbill is the quotation/estimate capability that converts automatically to an invoice once the customer accepts one of the draft proposals. I don't see that coming to WHSuite anytime soon, but interfaced bidirectionally with a good ERP we're able to work around that anyway - i.e., FrontAccounting, Liferay, OpenBravo, Odoo, and others that aren't strictly ERP are quite capable.

As far as the annual subscription fee is concerned, We didn't have a problem with it initially, but it was dropped - forever! So it should not be coming back for those grandfathered under that agreement.

And regarding the comments above about tech support tickets going unanswered..... Like you didn't already know they have almost always gone unanswered unless they were accompanied by the likelyhood of additional payments for services? These forums are full of people complaining about mission critical bugs and breakages that have left their enterprises unable to engage transactions with paid tickets for help left open with no reply - so that is nothing new.....

Apparently, there will be no response for paid for open trouble tickets unless the annual subscription fee is also paid lolz.....

[d4f]

No offense to WHSuite (which does look pretty nice on first glance) but I for one am not planning to migrate to another system anytime soon.
Prior to Hostbill we were running with AWBS until it died and getting the data over took half a year of planning and 8 partial rewrites of my migration code due to absolute lacking documentation and full encryption on both sides.
Unless the Hostbill maintenance fee gets higher than, say, the medical bill for heart attack or stroke, I am sticking with them for now.

I do appreciate the [edit: = WHSuite] effort of making most code open though, as it helps a lot with debugging weird issues and self-fixing critical bugs instead of having to basically beg Hostbill (again) for such a fix. Like when they broke multi-invoice payment with the last update...