Update: I've been checking out the HostBill forums at http://forum.hostbillapp.com - and of course unless you are a customer, you can't access anything outside of the Pre-Sales Forum. But wait, it gets even better: even if you are a customer you can't access the other forums unless you have an up to date and paid for subscription. Now at $999/year to renew, that's kind of a steep price to pay just for software updates and to be able to access the forums. My diagnosis: HostBill has gone completely bonkers!
I have tried HostBill for a short period of time last year, however I didn't like the admin area and some of the bugs it came with at the time. Customizing a responsive theme for it would have been a long and labor intensive process as well. To their credit, HostBill gave me a full refund for my branded license after almost 2 weeks of use. I paid $199.95 at the time for it.
Personally, I think that HostBill is a decent piece of software with a promising feature. Were it not for the abrupt price increases, it would have been great competition for WHMCS. However HostBill is a dollar short and a day late to the price hike, because more and more billing solutions are coming out. They are not mature yet, heck, most of them have no hosting features, however regardless of their state it's a sign that more and more developers are taking an interest in billing and project management applications.
My opinion is that HostBill is doing these abrupt price increases because of their emotional response to poor sales. I am posting this because I hope that it may knock some sense into the folks (or person) behind HostiBill and that they stop the non-sense. It's good to have competition in this market, and these price increases don't help matters. It seems that they are also trying to create the illusion of value out of thin air. Sorry, it's not possible.
Their renewal pricing for support and updates is also ridiculous: $999/year and $75/ticket with a 18 hour guaranteed response time (lol). Seeing this I would dare to wager that HostBill is a one man operation that has some 3rd party contractors doing some of the coding. I mean you have to be just one person to make such bone headed decisions without asking for a second opinion.
I think that reasonable pricing for HostBill would be $199.95 for branded and $249.95 for unbranded so that they can grab some market share and compete effectively against WHMCS. More people would convert over and they would actually make more money. Maybe in their imaginary world they think that they compete against Ubersmith, but that's just a pipe dream.
And of course there is a catch 22 in their TOS about the 30 Money Back guarantee, read carefully:
Below I am illustrating HostBill's pricing history:
And why not this on the next price hike?
