For those that are interested, I have just spotted awbs have released a AWBS v4.0.0 Beta release on the 17th May after 5 years of it being dead in the water.
It looks like they are giving it a “well overdue” complete overhaul and update, I have contacted support to see what the current situation is.
A commercial product that has been MIA for 5 years? That’s exactly the stability I look for in a billing system. 
I doubt they will have gone to the trouble of putting so much work into a big update if the plan was not to invest in the future development of it.
Previous to 2021 it had good support and was kept updated, If you look at the changelog you will see it had 70 updates from 2005 -21, so was actively maintained. Why it stopped I have no idea and never found out, but even before the last update I had issues with it due to it being stuck on php 7.
If you have something that you are currently using why would you want to switch? For those who may be interested in something different or just starting out, it is there as an option once it is fully released.
I hold two licences, from 2007, the yearly renewal used to be $35 and I found it to be a good system for the money, worked well with Virtualmin and had lots of modules to integrate with other systems.
can someone post a link 
I think a link is a step too far.
I did a search and looked at the site. I still think it wouldn’t be a bad idea too look for someone to partner with for VM integration on a billing suite. I think that’s about the only thing WM/VM could do that might finally get them some of the resources needed here.
You will see from the changelog how well it was supported and developed over 16 years, why it went wrong I never heard and I was surprised to see it back in development. Until it is fully released we will not know how it looks and certainly no idea how well it will be maintained in the future.
All I can say is that at the time it worked well with Virtualmin for the cost, $35 / year, compared to other systems.
I would be a little suspicious of something that went dormant for years and then came back to life. Especially a proprietary thing (I don’t know if the source is available for it).
There have been several high profile (and many more low-profile, and some not revealed yet) instances of someone acquiring old projects, like WordPress plugins, from the developer, and then adding malware. Folks trust it because of the long history, but don’t know about the software changing hands to a new unproven party…you can’t trust software, you can only ever trust the people who make software.
I’m not at all saying that’s what’s happening here, but I would be very cautious. Maybe spend a little time digging up whether the owners/developers have changed.
Another explanation for it coming back is that the time cost of software maintenance/development has gone way down with LLMs. In the hands of an experienced developer working with a known codebase, one developer can do the work of two or three pretty good developers. I can imagine a scenario where someone was making not enough money for the time invested to back off from a project, and then find that the time necessary to keep it running is now low enough to make it worthwhile.
I think one should also be a little suspicious of that latter case, though, as well. LLMs are powerful but still risky. We’ve been doing a bunch of security auditing and automated testing with them lately, as well as reviewing our own code with them automatically, and they work, but they definitely make mistakes. So, if someone were just vibe-coding new features without actually taking the time to understand what the LLM is doing, it could also be quite risky from a security and stability perspective. I would expect a project maintainer with a lot of experience to be capable of steering LLMs to produce good work on that project, though.
A lot of that going on. The pace of security updates, especially php, has been dizzying of late. But the good thing for me is I just have to do a few button clicks. 
Yeah, it’s not that LLMs are necessarily better at finding security vulnerabilities than experienced humans, it’s that they’re tireless and fast. Humans can’t focus that intensely for more than a couple/few hours at a time, while the machines don’t care about time…they just chew on whatever code you show them for as long as it takes. So, what used to take months or years can now be done by agents in days and for a few hundred or a few thousand dollars worth of tokens.
Y’all know I’m ambivalent about these things (and I still hate their prose and I hate seeing AI generated imagery and video clogging up social media), but I can’t argue they don’t find bugs. We either use them to find our security bugs, or somebody else does…and we can’t control what they do with that information if they find the bugs before we do. We’ve been lucky, so far, none of the bugs that have been revealed by our own testing or by outside reporters have been critical stop-the-world everybody panic issues (as happened for cPanel recently), but we have found a bunch of XSS bugs that had been lurking for years.
Just out of curiosity, based on your input, I decided to see what I can find about the current state of ownership on the topic. Wasn’t encouraging as far as transparency goes. For legal purposes, I’ll leave it there.
Send them an email and ask them to do a blog post explaining why the software has come back to life. I did find it strange that there was no information about the comeback on the site.