Custom coder / Consultant needed before purchase

[sebastianf]

Hi there, this is my first post here.

We are considering of changing onto Hostbill (We currently have our own billing/provisioning platform coded entirely by our devel team). Hostbill  has very interesting features, but as theres no demo,  and i havent been authorized to purchase, im blind. Tried calling Hostbill phone with no success, sent a custom development email without any response yet.

Does anybody in this forum offers consultancy ?

We need several invoicing and payment tweaks and have no idea if its possible. Do i need the devel license to do custom coding?

Does the platform works well with postpaid customers ? (Been hours and hours googling and reading everywere and i cant find an explicit answer)

And last but not least, is there support service good? Do they reply on time? I assume phone support is out of the question as they dont even bother to answer the phone for presales.

We have been evaluating WHMCS, it has far more plugins than Hostbill and they do have presales personnel, but the colocation manager and cacti of hostbill is what caught our attention.

These platforms are the base of every company, that said, im looking for a robust system with reliable contact and tech support from the vendor,

Thanks so much in advance

[d4f]

Tried calling Hostbill phone with no success, sent a custom development email without any response yet.

It's very hard to get hold of him both pre- and post-sales.

We need several invoicing and payment tweaks and have no idea if its possible.

Depends on the tweaks you need. You can technically add your own hooks, plugins, template files, etc... but seeing as there is virtually no documentation on the classes, functionality or inner workings you are essentially blind if you don't buy the source-code version.

Does the platform works well with postpaid customers ?

While the system supports postpaid invoices of sorts, it really is not designed for such usage scenarios and is really designed to fully automate prepaid billing handling as that is the most prominent in webhosting environments.
I have to say that it does handle prepaid very well with lots of options and I consider prepaid superior to postpaid for such services both for the operator and for the customers.

And last but not least, is there support service good?

You are unable to contact him for pre-sale support. Do I really have to answer the question how support will be post-sales? 
To be fair the software is very good if you get it to work the way you need it and it works rather reliably. However it keeps having regression bugs in about one of four updates which are usually quickly fixed but can cause major disruptions like proforma invoices being sent out without an invoice number.  Testing is obviously not one of his strengths.

We have been evaluating WHMCS

Imho WHMCS is terribly bad. It looks nice, works nice but no matter how much time I spend, it never seems to actually do what I want it to.

im looking for a robust system with reliable contact and tech support from the vendor

If those are your criteria (and I well understand them) then Hostbill is currently NOT for you. However I can't recommend an alternative either because a lot of the alternatives we evaluated when switching to Hostbill in 2012 are either dead, bought up or otherwise now uninteresting.

[BRJP]

We have been evaluating WHMCS, it has far more plugins than Hostbill and they do have presales personnel, but the colocation manager and cacti of hostbill is what caught our attention.

My tech guys switched to WHMCS as it had features they wanted.  We have managed to make it work to our needs.  That is not to say that HostBill did not work for us but WHMCS has been a positive success.  Each system/service has their own set of problems.  But the support and regression issues with HostBill do keep rearing their ugly head and causing pain with many users.