What is the way actually for HostBill?

[Nicman]

Hi all,

Is someone still using Hostbill?

What do you think about his future? I still hope the things changes and Hostbill continues going better each week...

Thank you.

Kind regards,

[Sentro]

I've been seeing i think more updates lately but not really sure if that mean's its future is improving.

HostBill's future changed back in May.

The way Kris is handling this product first on the support side and second on pricing side is horrible.

[Nicman]

Hi Sentro,

Are you still using it?

Thank you.

Kind regards,

[Sentro]

Yes, luckily we bought it before the May incident and we are still using it.

Might wanna check some other threads in the forum concerning the prices
just to get an idea of what's going on with the module prices too.

Anything you might need hit me up.

[nibb]

Yes but I don´t need to use if I want in the future. Its my choice.

Hostbill has no new features anymore for current owners. Only a bug fix here and there. Nothing new in almost 6 months now.

No commercial support.

And they don´t provide any customer care what so ever, at all. Not even basic questions.

So what im doing is start to use as less features possible from it and build my own things for what I need.

I try to interact with my data directly skipping hostbill completely if I can. So eventually I would be able to completely drop it, in particular because its so locked down and encoded you cannot do anything with it anymore. Their API and hooks is nice, but its still very limited and useless without proper documentation and their constant idiotic rules means I prefer to slowly move away from them in particular because now they don´t even send emails anymore to customers when a security flaw is discovered. Nothing. Its like having a ghost software running.

So yes, Hostbill still works, but I would not bet my future on it. I have a bail plan any minute if they decide to blow up which so far seems to be happening because time did teach us a lesson. They get worse with time, no better. As a company they are worst and worst every year. So I think 2015 is going to be the blow up year probably and 2014 is going to be bad enough for them.

I figure out that I don´t need a software like this in the first place. Most of what it does is just use third party API, like cPanel, Cloudstack, etc, all of them are open with excellent documentation and you can use them directly and from the billing side, there are better accounting programs which also invoice automatically, in finance hostbill is very crappy because it cannot even calculate your earnings, it just gives you a rough brute income.

Do you need everything it does?

Lets see. Support? There are better solutions out you can buy from decent companies which include tickets, chats, etc.

Accounting. There are far better ones as well.

Automation, hostbill does not do anything, they just use external API and talk to third party software, this means you can do all that part in your own or pay a developer.

As time goes on, their competitors are having more and more features build in their core. Hostbill is committing suicide because they are putting everything in external modules. You know what this means right?

That they are not building absolutely anything new anymore in their software for almost half a year now. Every week they just launch new modules, but nothing really new in the software while their competitors are building new features "DIRECTLY" into their cores and software.

In the end you will end up with a software that is worthless without modules. And modules are never going to be as powerful as features build directly into the core or engine of a software. This means Hostbill is getting more poor each day and other softwares are catching up. I don´t need their stupid modules because they do basic stuff and they don´t even do it right. A serious company would probably have to build their own modules from scratch. And their main software does not have any new features since before May.

You could then argue that "Its a commercial software, and commercially supported "but that is not true either. You get no support, no nothing, so its like using open source or something free since it has no real company value behind it.

YES, I still use, and YES I will still use it next year, but I don´t need to use it. I just use it because I own it already and what it does now works. But since companies evolve and services evolve, eventually it will not be able to do anymore what I need because its going to be obsolete since nothing new is build into it anymore. This means I starting to need more and more things, and I just will build them on my own since you cannot even suggest them new features and they want money for that probably as well I don´t even waste my time suggesting them things. My time costs money as well, so they should be paying me instead to suggest them features.