As a way to make it easier for those who use the system, in their paid options, it would be important that in the Control Panel of My Account there was the option for automatic or recurring payments.
Some accounting app?
Insert into the system for this purpose - Stripe, PayPal, or others that may facilitate our payments.
WHMCS has the main objective of being the financial arm of WHM built for Cpanel.
Yes, the eventual “MINCS” would be the financial arm of Webmin/Virtualmin/Cloudmin.
WHMCS is not owned by cPanel. They have some sort of sales partnership (but so do we, actually, we get a small amount of affiliate revenue from WHMCS whenever you install WHMCS using our Install Scripts interface), but they aren’t related, otherwise.
But, we maybe have come to the conclusion that we can’t have a viable business just offering Virtualmin/Cloudmin, and probably would need to build a proprietary billing system to make this thing profitable enough to employ the four of us full-time (and even that’s questionable). That said, we don’t really want to be in the billing business; accounting and bookkeeping and payments is not our area of expertise or interest, which is why we’ve always encouraged folks to build products for that purpose that integrate with Virtualmin. WHMCS is just one of the few that does it well (though there are some others).
It’s still up in the air whether we would or could do that. It’d be a whole new product, quite large in its own right. WHMCS is a much bigger company than we are, for instance.
But, the positive thing about a billing app is that no one can be too angry about us charging money for it, since the only reason you need a billing app is to make money. We’ve always tried to differentiate Pro and GPL mostly in terms of “Are you using this for business and on a large scale, or is it a hobby?” and for the folks doing it for business we’d like a little money, while we try to provide folks who’re building out their own sites or hosting for friends and family or for their own OSS projects with a great free and open source product. Since making money is the primary thing we’ve never done well, having a product that’s all about making money would probably be a smart business decision. I just don’t know if I have the energy/time/motivation for it.
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I’ll ask STRIPE about that goal, if there is that permission.
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I’m not sure what you’d ask Stripe about?
If they could develop a module to be integrated with Webmin / Virtualmin / Cloudmin for users to make payments directly to you. And what would be the steps for this development. I believe that since the return for them could be interesting, they would reduce the fees and the resulting costs a bit.
My only dealings with stripe was a client (not VM related) went with stripe for the low fees and bought the recommended Terminal. Issue was the Terminal had no inbuilt programming to talk to Stripe. I went on stripe to see how to get it working and they gave all the Documentation for the api calls for a third party server and they did not develop it for you. Basically I had to work it out myself or hire a developer. I found a WordPress solution with 2 plugins, one for the stripe gateway developed by woocommerce (free) and the one for the terminal developed by a third party (free but got a small % on each transaction).
So Stripe won’t in my experience develop that option for you.
From the above I believe they would. However, if they do not, I will consult another payment system.
They answer questions, point you to documentation and existing APIs, etc. They don’t do development for free (beyond the APIs they maintain in several languages).
Don’t get me wrong, Stripe is very easy to integrate with, and they handle a lot of stuff that used to be crazy hard to do (like recurring payments). But, you still have to write your own software or use one of the off-the-shelf shopping cart or commerce apps with it.
In my view, merge GPL and Pro as there is really no difference in the 2. Place a limit of 5 sites/accounts on what was called gpl and charge a nominal amount 2 or 5 bucks a month for the now pro and you wont know what to do with all the money. You 4 can then get going on Virtualmin Cloudmin and the new billing system. You get your cut and the home user gets to use it, plus the complainers of the change probably aren’t paying you now anyway so win win.
Cant be any fairer then that mate …
Michael
Once you create a GPL it is out there for all to use. The only thing you end up doing is making the next version “Pro” and effectively making the GPL “end of life” That then just generates bad publicity which impacts the “Pro” version - just look at Cpanel. There has to be some incentive to go “Pro” and the number of VPS is not one. Neither is some sort of accounting software, all that is going to do is divert resources. would it ever have a USP or will it just be yet another ME2
I fully support that idea. So they can have a surporte with more trained and specific people to handle the transit of requests.
I do not agree with this view that charging will lead to a drop in usage.
You will not make the end of the life of the GPL, but limited.
New users will be able to try out and use the GPL for their initial purposes.
After knowing the platform effectively you will see that it is worth paying a small amount.
This idea presented seems close to the format used in DirectAdmin.
See that most of the big players in this sector charge and is widely used by many users.
Cpanel charges for the amount of users scaling the limits and still have many customers.
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Not wishing to argue only to say I probably did not make it clear enough.
Once something is GPL (open source/ available on git) it is out there for ever.
The only way to go the way of a restricted piece of software is to make a better/newer version (something with something more to offer than the original.
So what will make someone the leap into a “Pro” version?
I am certain some sticking plaster of accounting software would not convince me, my head of dept or my CEO. We already employ an accountant and we would argue the toss with him for years as to why they should abandon the software they have already spent time and effort justifying.
It was already pointed out there is very little difference between the GPL and Pro versions. A change to the VPS limit would not work - it doesn’t now.
There has to be something in the Pro version that puts it out there as being better that the rest and have something the rest do not have. I’m not sure what that is or even what that could be.
But I do think blatant adverts for DirectAdmin and cPanel are very inappropriate on this forum.
The mentions about the other companies, I don’t think it matters, since we have to reflect on a real basis of facts.
This is the best Control Panel I’m using and I’ve been through almost all the existing ones.
What’s more, I see huge potential for growth here.
A trial phase, for example, would be required with a longer timeframe, such as 30/60 days.
So the user would know the system and face the normal difficulties to have a complete visualization and the efficiency of the whole.
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I looked at this for awhile. Good idea but I think they forked it from something else and the developers got enough working to suit their needs. (Maybe it was abandoned?) Not sure the actual software will ever be beta quality though. But, I do kinda like the overall format.
There is a Virtualmin module that they don’t even know how it is supposed to work. 
But really, any open source billing software might be willing to work with others to expand the offering. I’m not a coder but there has to be some interest in the VM community.
Basic format of the above software is to import or export packages for Virtualmin. Rest is basic billing software. I think it may have had help desk integrated. Been a few months since I looked at it.