Owned License for Sale

[voua]

I have an owned license of Hostbill for sale. Was previously used by one of my clients. Looks like you currently the owned licenses start at $599 but you can have this one for $250 or Best offer.

Contact me to buy it and I'll just need your info to change on the account.

[Enterprisevpssolutions]

When was the licensed purchased? The older licenses some might get but the newer ones you can forget about it.

[tallship]

If it's a license from 4.5.8 or before I'll offer you $75.00 for it if no one else wants it - But for the sake of congeniality, @EnterpriseVPSsolutions has first dibbs on it before me

[Patrick]

All based on if 'kbkp' will allow the sale.  Should be interesting to see how this goes.

[Sentro]

What makes you think he'll come out of his cave?

[tallship]

All based on if 'kbkp' will allow the sale.  Should be interesting to see how this goes.

All that's really occurring in a sale is giving the buyer the uid/login for the licensee. From there, email addys, host, and dir can be changed at will.

[rharrison]

Hi,

is this license still for sale?

If so can we PM OP?

[tallship]

Send them a PM and see if it's still available.

I'm not sure if I bought that one or not.

But you do know that you can buy hostbill licenses for a hundred bucks all day long, right? I've only been paying between 50 and only up to 100 dollars max, and then only if the license is a pre 4.6.0 version of hostbill.

These boards are a great marketplace for buying and selling HostBill, and there's a few other threads here where people have offered licenses for sale that may still be available.

We should actually have a sub-forum specifically for those who would like to participate in marketplace functions like buying and selling HosBill, modules, etc.

I know Lawrence was working on deploying some sort of marketplace, but it hasn't been opened yet. Until then, I guess the regular discussion board will suffice. It just makes searching and watching for available software a bit more involved than just looking in a particular location where you should be able to expect them to be.

[rharrison]

Perhaps you can explain some more. I am a newcomer to HostBill software, but I have been looking at it for a while. The quote I received has since tripled from ~300 to 900, for cpanel mod and core.

If I wish to use a template I have to buy a theme I believe? Since my servers use cpanel, I take it that the cpanel module would be the only other needed.

Are the versions you use current? Does it expire?

[tallship]

Perhaps you can explain some more. I am a newcomer to HostBill software, but I have been looking at it for a while. The quote I received has since tripled from ~300 to 900, for cpanel mod and core.

The prices are all over the place, changed frequently and in bizzare ways, and now aren't listed at all - you have to ask for a quote I guess, so you would know better whatever the price is you were quoted.

If I wish to use a template I have to buy a theme I believe? Since my servers use cpanel, I take it that the cpanel module would be the only other needed.

Okay this keeps changing all the time too. kpkp (the person, the company, who puts out HostBill) is very erratic on both the pricing and the packaging, and if you look around these forums a bit you'll see that tech support is pretty much non-existent too; with no or very late responses to paid for tickets that often don't even provide you with the answer before he closes those tickets.

Look around these forums and you'll be appalled.

If you purchase a HostBill license from someone who owned the software prior to the release of version 4.6.0, then you are entitled to everything, except for the new features released beginning with version 4.6.0 and moving forward - that is basically everything - cPanel, several templates/order pages, and all kinds of modules.

Having said that, in order to get all of that (even though you would now be entitled to everything), you would still need to get your hands on HostBill version 4.5.8 - which I doubt you will have a hard time getting anyone but the person who sells you the license. This is the last version of the software (I think), that included everything.

Since then, people are saying that they only have access to whatever they purchased since 4.6.0. What's interesting, is that the tarballs (zip files) continue to get larger, so I don't know why people who purchase the software now get nothing, and have to buy cPanel for an extra fee, and order the order pages and templates as separate packages too.

But in a nutshell, if you buy a new license now, you need to buy HostBill, then a module for cPanel, maybe a template, and maybe order pages. I don't think you have to purchase the payment gateways separately though.

Are the versions you use current? Does it expire?

The versions are always as current as you choose to keep them updated to. For a while, a couple of months back, this was not the case, but kbkp reversed their decision to charge for updates and not update existing users who didn't have subscriptions. There's no indication at this particular moment in time that he's going to change this policy, but he's one erratic goombah.

Last month, he announced that HostBill would only be updated once every two weeks, but that only happened once, if ever, and then it went back to every week. When he did that, he announced an *Enterprse* version, that requires a dedictated server (whatever that means, you install HostBill on a dedicated server anyway by creating a database and then a virtual host, and installing into that directory).

I guess he hasn't sold a single *enterprise* version of HostBill, because it is no longer mentioned in the weekly changelogs. It made no sense anyway and was widely considered to just be yet another greedy grab to squeeze money out of gullible new customers.

Now he doesn't have prices at all - you get a quote I guess. So the prices can be different for everyone.

Patrick (or maybe it was Lawrence) actually added up the cost to get everything with version 4.6.x that would have been included with version 4.5.8 and I think it came up to about 20 thousand dollars - for a $300 piece of software that is constantly breaking due to new bugs, with bugs not getting fixed, and new modules he can't sell to anyone that no one buys anymore. With every update is the very real concern that the parts of HostBill that you depend on the most will break and you're business will be down the drain.

For example, he broke something in last weeks update so bad that he had to release a patch on Thursday, I believe it was, when a full update was released on the following day (each Friday there is a new update). He doesn't always bother to fix what he breaks, people using OnApp with metered billing have been complaining about a serious accounting bug that prevents them from properly billing or metering their customers, or something like that, for about two months now.

If kbkp fixes something, he does it when he does it, and not before - and he has a fake bugtracker that has often marks bugs as fixed when they weren't, and many critical bugs have been in there since he first launched the bug tracker - some of those bugs are over two years old, and were in the old forums before kbkp decided he wanted to take them offline because so many customers were screaming and the press was so bad he couldn't sell HostBill to anyone. 

So current means yes, we get updates every week on Fridays. But current does not mean that we get new features - we don't, and the existing features have not been getting updated to keep pace with the changing needs. What I suspect he'll do is when it gets so broken that it doesn't work anymore, he'll release a version 2 of that module and force people to buy that, letting the deprecated module die a miserable death - he's done this before with a couple of modules, so expect to see a cPanel 2 eventually that will cost you yet another $299, or whatever he's charging per module this week.

Your best bet *might* be, if you're interested in HostBill (instead of WHMCS or better yet Blesta - which most people here will recommend you use instead of Hostbill) is to buy a pre 4.6.0 licensee who wants to sell their license to you here at hostbillforums, and give you version 4.5.8.

You can get that right now for perhaps $100 (HostBill doesn't have much value in the industry lately), and then you can apply the update the Friday following your install, and you will have pretty much everything, and be up to date.

If you're just starting off, however, consider that the reason HostBill is only selling for $50 to $100 nowadays is because there is a mass exodus of HostBill users trying to convert their existing customers to ANY other platform out there, to save their businesses from ruin, due to the uncertain nature of HostBill's future, the erratic behavior of kbkp hiimself, the total ignoring of most support tickets (that cost you $75 each to get ignored much of the time), etc.

If you're sure you want to go with HostBill then the forums here are a great marketplace to get used, owned, unbranded licenses for cheap.

Personally, since all you're offering your customers is shared cPanel hosting, I would recommend you take a look at http://blesta.com - I think it may even still be only $99 for an owned copy, and the annual subscriptions are reasonable too - it does everything you're going to need it to do right now, is prettier than HostBill for your customers, and there is a healthy party of 3rd party developers that are writing modules for your future expansion - and much less of it is encoded so you can get a lot of the source and customize it yourself... unlike HostBill.

They have forums that the devs actually participate in, they answer their support tickets quickly, they help you when you have a problem, and they have a phone number you can call them at too. None of those things exist for HostBill.

[Cloudrck]

Does this mean I can sell my license here?

[tallship]

Does this mean I can sell my license here?

It is legal to sell your *owned* license.

[voua]

Interesting. I never received notification that anyone responded to this thread. Must not have checked something.

Yes I can transfer the license. I'm even open to leasing it monthly.

It is an older license. Currently 4.9.8. Still gets all the latest updates. Does not include any of the new paid plugins though. Thats something new HB is trying.

It's one of a couple I purchased for different clients.

Expires 9.9.2030, therefore I guess owned doesnt really mean forever. :-)

[ntrs]

sent you a PM, interested in buying asap.

Thanks.

Bob

[voua]

One additional note. It is branded and has the upgrade option to be unbranded for $400 more.

You can see the client front end here. http://go.webciti.es

Anyone interested in leasing it can use it, installed for $39/mo hosted on our servers. We can even help you configure the simple hosting thru CPANEL.

Cheers!