@hzhoanglee said:
From my own point of view, building a portal to automate the process of payment, hosting/server provision is easy and can be done quickly nowadays. But, the reason why people are still messing with WHMCS is the ecosystem, the plugins, the tons of business use cases that the hosting companies ask for (tax, costs,...), the reliability and they have a community of professional users.
That's can not be built in just a short period of time to be an alternative. It need to be built and maintain for many years to reach a somewhere of what WHMCS is covering.
And good luck btw
I've got no experience in this area, so I'm just making some wide assumptions:
Most gateways have pretty thorough API documentation
Most software and control panel used in the industry have thorough API documentation (Proxmox, VirtFusion, Virtualizor, even just raw dogging libvirt, etc)
I'd reckon that the easiest part is accepting payment and getting services auto-deployed, but will go out on a limb and assume that the real challenge is making a halfway decent administrative area that makes it suitable for business use. Clients will be happy to just see that their services are online, can review some historical data (invoices paid, service provisioning dates, etc) and with a fancy UI. But I'd say the admin side of things is the real challenge, things like proper accounting, action logging, searching with unique and specific filters for all sorts of things, etc. I'm not a coder so perhaps I'm overthinking it.
Hopefully the project does well. We need more WHMCS contenders. I shit on WHMCS all the time but sadly it's still the best option as of now. We're messing with Blesta on the side to see about using it for some things (not a full WHMCS replacement), but still undecided if it's worth managing two systems especially when one (Blesta) will require a lot of custom dev stuff for us to be happy with it. (Mainly wanting to move domains and DNS related stuff away from WHMCS so we're not getting placed in costlier licensing tiers because of a ton of 'active clients' who net little profit)
@hzhoanglee said:
From my own point of view, building a portal to automate the process of payment, hosting/server provision is easy and can be done quickly nowadays. But, the reason why people are still messing with WHMCS is the ecosystem, the plugins, the tons of business use cases that the hosting companies ask for (tax, costs,...), the reliability and they have a community of professional users.
That's can not be built in just a short period of time to be an alternative. It need to be built and maintain for many years to reach a somewhere of what WHMCS is covering.
And good luck btw
I've got no experience in this area, so I'm just making some wide assumptions:
Most gateways have pretty thorough API documentation
Most software and control panel used in the industry have thorough API documentation (Proxmox, VirtFusion, Virtualizor, even just raw dogging libvirt, etc)
I'd reckon that the easiest part is accepting payment and getting services auto-deployed, but will go out on a limb and assume that the real challenge is making a halfway decent administrative area that makes it suitable for business use. Clients will be happy to just see that their services are online, can review some historical data (invoices paid, service provisioning dates, etc) and with a fancy UI. But I'd say the admin side of things is the real challenge, things like proper accounting, action logging, searching with unique and specific filters for all sorts of things, etc. I'm not a coder so perhaps I'm overthinking it.
Hopefully the project does well. We need more WHMCS contenders. I shit on WHMCS all the time but sadly it's still the best option as of now. We're messing with Blesta on the side to see about using it for some things (not a full WHMCS replacement), but still undecided if it's worth managing two systems especially when one (Blesta) will require a lot of custom dev stuff for us to be happy with it. (Mainly wanting to move domains and DNS related stuff away from WHMCS so we're not getting placed in costlier licensing tiers because of a ton of 'active clients' who net little profit)
I completely agree with this. We are currently building out our own portal that will be in-house only. Taking payment and the service auto deploying is easy, we could have had this accomplished within hours of starting the project because we're linking into Stripe, we get a webhook to say payment was successful then we tap into Enhance or Virtfusion to say setup the service.
However the real work is tying everything together, especially the orders, services and invoicing together - something we were working on yesterday is when a order is refunded, it needs to be marked as refunded, refund the payment via Stripe, suspend the service, mark the invoice as refunded and then create a credit note invoice. It's easy to think 'ah, just have a refund button' but then it's the amount of actions that need to be kicked off after this, ensure every action was successful, it if wasn't successful then handle this.
We avoid WHMCS because it's Webpros and we try to avoid them where possible. We switched from Clientexec to Blesta around a year ago because it worked better for us. Blesta is great because it's so customisable being mostly open but then you have to consider this every time there is an update, but the third party plugins that we rely on are mostly paid and encoded; we can't change their behaviour or fix bugs and need to rely on third party devs to fix them which takes time.
I commend @Mustafamw3 for doing something like this to eventually open source it - it's a lot of work.
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Comments
I've got no experience in this area, so I'm just making some wide assumptions:
I'd reckon that the easiest part is accepting payment and getting services auto-deployed, but will go out on a limb and assume that the real challenge is making a halfway decent administrative area that makes it suitable for business use. Clients will be happy to just see that their services are online, can review some historical data (invoices paid, service provisioning dates, etc) and with a fancy UI. But I'd say the admin side of things is the real challenge, things like proper accounting, action logging, searching with unique and specific filters for all sorts of things, etc. I'm not a coder so perhaps I'm overthinking it.
Hopefully the project does well. We need more WHMCS contenders. I shit on WHMCS all the time but sadly it's still the best option as of now. We're messing with Blesta on the side to see about using it for some things (not a full WHMCS replacement), but still undecided if it's worth managing two systems especially when one (Blesta) will require a lot of custom dev stuff for us to be happy with it. (Mainly wanting to move domains and DNS related stuff away from WHMCS so we're not getting placed in costlier licensing tiers because of a ton of 'active clients' who net little profit)
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I completely agree with this. We are currently building out our own portal that will be in-house only. Taking payment and the service auto deploying is easy, we could have had this accomplished within hours of starting the project because we're linking into Stripe, we get a webhook to say payment was successful then we tap into Enhance or Virtfusion to say setup the service.
However the real work is tying everything together, especially the orders, services and invoicing together - something we were working on yesterday is when a order is refunded, it needs to be marked as refunded, refund the payment via Stripe, suspend the service, mark the invoice as refunded and then create a credit note invoice. It's easy to think 'ah, just have a refund button' but then it's the amount of actions that need to be kicked off after this, ensure every action was successful, it if wasn't successful then handle this.
We avoid WHMCS because it's Webpros and we try to avoid them where possible. We switched from Clientexec to Blesta around a year ago because it worked better for us. Blesta is great because it's so customisable being mostly open but then you have to consider this every time there is an update, but the third party plugins that we rely on are mostly paid and encoded; we can't change their behaviour or fix bugs and need to rely on third party devs to fix them which takes time.
I commend @Mustafamw3 for doing something like this to eventually open source it - it's a lot of work.
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9950X and 7950X, Litespeed, Redis Cache, NVMe Drives, Daily Backups, 24x7 Support, Wordpress Optimised.
I think systemd is a personality trait.
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