Suggestion: Introducing an Unlimited Domains Plan Without Support

General Discussion
1

Dear Virtualmin Support Team,

I hope you’re doing well. First, I want to commend you on providing such a robust and feature-rich platform. Virtualmin has been an invaluable tool for managing my servers, and I appreciate the flexibility and functionality it offers.

I’m writing to suggest an addition to your subscription options: an Unlimited Domains Plan without support, offered at a reduced price.

Currently, the Professional plans are excellent for users who need premium features and support. However, for users like myself—who are comfortable managing our servers without additional support—the ability to access unlimited domains at a lower cost would be highly beneficial.

This plan could still include all the features of the Professional plan, just excluding private ticket support, making it more accessible for advanced users or those on tighter budgets.

I believe this option would attract a wider range of users, particularly small businesses and developers who require scalability but are capable of self-managing their servers.

Thank you for considering this suggestion. I’d be happy to discuss it further or provide feedback from a user perspective.

Best regards,

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2

Isn’t the Virtualmin Unlimited license clearly meant for businesses? And, why would a business care about a small price drop for a few bucks when it’s already one of the most affordable options on the market?

3

Why not make it completely free? Happy to help ruin a great product by demotivating the devs even faster.

4

You’re absolutely right that the Virtualmin Unlimited license is already a fantastic value for businesses, and I agree it’s one of the most affordable options out there. However, my suggestion isn’t aimed at reducing the price just for the sake of savings—it’s about creating a flexible option for a different type of user.

Not all users of Virtualmin are large businesses with dedicated budgets. Some of us are independent developers, freelancers, or small-scale server admins who manage multiple domains but don’t necessarily need premium support. A plan without support could better serve this group without detracting from the value of the existing offerings.

It’s less about cost-cutting and more about tailoring the product to meet the needs of a broader audience. Offering this kind of flexibility could help Virtualmin attract more users who might otherwise turn to free or less feature-rich alternatives.

I hope this perspective clarifies the intent behind the suggestion!

5

I would guess that to be the smallest outlay for virtualmin in producing the pro version the most of the cost being the development of the extra features. Why not use gpl as you sound like a person who knows what they are doing and can, if required, replicate the required pro functions in your own home built scripts

6

You can totally do exactly that with the GPL version.

And if you’re into reselling and need reseller accounting and the whole shebang, well, let’s be real – don’t tell me you can’t manage $75 a year for it. Bet you wouldn’t request the same to cPanel or Plesk, would you?

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My friend, I think you’re missing the whole point, which is to give the developers something rather than nothing with GPL.

8

If you want to give “something” to the developers, go and donate or, hey, even better: Purchase the Pro version and support this remarkable product.

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This isn’t about me; it’s about the idea and the potential income for the developers.
A pro version without support is a free income for the developers.

10

No it’s not, modst of the cost is developing the pro features not supporting it

11

Since they offer their support on the forum, even if not as fast, it is still support and still takes up their time.

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12

Support is quite a lot of our monetary cost, as we pay Ilia and Eric for that. It may be the largest part of our monetary cost.

But, that’s only the case because Jamie and I work mostly for free.

So, realistically, if we were a real company that had to make money to keep operating and everyone was drawing a salary, it would probably be a pretty even split between support and development.

The act of “productizing” something for a commercial purpose is a lot more than it would be for a regular OSS project. We maintain the installer and repos for a bunch of distributions, we maintain test infrastructure for a bunch of distros and versions, etc.

Basically, it’s all expensive, it’s all time-consuming, and we obviously charge too little for both the software and the support. As evidenced by the fact that nobody else offers a product of this scale in this space for this kind of price, and definitely not with support.

My thinking has always been that I’m uncomfortable offering an “unsupported” product. I don’t feel like that’s ethical, and so realistically, I would support it anyway here in the forum (as I do for GPL, unpaid). This is my own failing as a business person. Our competitors have no qualms about offering a complicated product without support and charging $50 per incident for support tickets, or whatever. And, maybe if I want this to be a business that can actually support the people that work on it, I need to accept that as a reasonable thing to do.

But, if we did offer a “no support” option, it wouldn’t be cheaper. We’d need to adjust the premium “with support” products upward. If we’re going to change the pricing and the model for how we sell and support the software, we’re going to just have to bite the bullet and accept the anger of raising prices across the board.

Every time someone asks for cheaper licenses I am reminded that our licenses are too cheap to support us (we all have other jobs, by necessity, Virtualmin is not self-sustaining), despite working quite a lot and having quite a lot of users. Giving nearly everything away for free is a pretty bad business model.

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13

All that said, it is true that a small percentage of users and customers account for a very large percentage of the time spent on support. We have a handful of customers that are very high touch, asking probably more than is reasonable of us, and we’re probably too accommodating of that because we do say “unlimited support”.

We try to draw boundaries around what we can help with (the source of our “we won’t log in to your server” rule, as well as trying to shut down conversations about anything outside of Virtualmin and the services Virtualmin manages…we don’t commit to supporting something just because there’s a Webmin module for it), but the temptation is always there to answer Just One More Question about something that we clearly shouldn’t be taking responsibility for but that maybe we know a few things about from decades of sysadmin experience.

So, maybe making support a separate thing would help solve that. Maybe it’d increase revenue while limiting the burden of that small set of support “super consumers”, since they’d have to consider the cost every time they think of another way to get us to administer their servers or support products from other vendors and providers, well beyond what we’re actually promising as part of our support. Most customers rarely need help and they’re respectful of the boundaries about what we’re committing to supporting (our products and the services they directly manage), and so supporting them is generally quite easy.

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14

Keep the forum as is and maybe put a AUP (acceptable use policy) or just define max number of incident that can be handed through the ticket system .

As an end user and a novice admin I try my best to learn what I need and usually ask for help on the forum but it is always good to know I can ask through an official ticket.

It is an interesting proposal but I am not the best to give my opinion on it.

1 Like
15

My idea was based on limited knowledge. If you offer a plan (pro without support), will everyone take it and end up seeing it as a downside rather than an increase in income?

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Yeah, I think we have a more delicate balance to walk than our biggest competitors do. We always have to consider whether changing prices, support policies, etc. will drive more users to use the free version of the product, which is also very good and already does just about everything most of our competitors do. Something is better than nothing in this case. cPanel gets away with huge price hikes because for people familiar with cPanel and who have users familiar with cPanel, the cost to migrate is pretty high, often higher than the license and support cost of sticking with cPanel.

We also want Virtualmin Pro to be affordable. I know things are tough all over and every major corporation has raised prices over the past couple of years, and I feel like because our marginal cost (not taking into account support burden) is very low, we can resist the temptation to raise prices just because everyone else has. But, my cost of living has gone up, too, so we can’t be too averse to charging more.

So, maybe the secret to really tapping into that marginal cost advantage of software is separating the software from the very limited scalability of support. Support gets more expensive and takes more time with every new customer (though not every customer needs the same amount of help). And, in an ideal world, we’d be able to spend a lot of time on documentation and making the product easier to use, and maybe making more money with less support burden could would allow that to happen (we have a huge amount of documentation, and we obviously try to make the product easier with every release, but time is always a limiting factor for a tiny team of people working part-time). Maybe that’s better for more people more of the time than what we currently do, I don’t know.

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17

Why not just offer Developer plans that are the same as Pro but without support for exactly the same price as the Pro plans?

That way the “developers” can feel they are being catered to with no financial hit to Virtualmin. The developers can wear it as a badge of honour.

18

Huh?! This feels like it might need a bit more thought…

If the Developer plan costs the same as the Pro plan but doesn’t include support, wouldn’t people just go for the Pro plan every time? Feels like no one would pick the Developer plan if it’s the same price but offers less.

19

I’ll note that when people have been developing something that works with Virtualmin we have been known to give away Pro licenses, to enable them to support Pro features (and because we want people to develop products and OSS projects that work with Virtualmin). Ilia got free licenses before we were paying him regularly, for instance.

It’s good for everybody when someone is developing something for Virtualmin. Of course, that doesn’t include folks who are developing something for a private commercial thing, like their own websites or whatever, and Virtualmin is just a tool to do that job rather than a thing they’re working on and with from a developer perspective for something that will be released to the public.

1 Like
20

Hello,
I was very happy with @ [MrZaKaRiA] question because I had the same question a few years back and I finally ended up staying with the GPL version. I also recently asked about the “donate” page because I fell really bad using Virtualmin without paying.
But IIRC my questions at this time were more about the licensing structure, again IIRC licenses were per/server and per/domain and as we do move domains across servers quite often, it was difficult to choose let’s say a 10 domains license for this server, a 20 for this one, and being stuck because I had to move an additional domain on the already full 10 domains server …
I would be compelled to take a very large domain license (50 to be safe) for each server which at the end would amount for quite a big sum, let’s say 30 servers at $100 is $3000 which starts to represent some money … I was asking at this time for a license that could be global (unlimited servers, unlimited domains without the need to specify a number of domains per server), with or without priority support is another question, this type of license would give admins a total liberty (adding domains, adding servers, moving domains across servers, cancelling servers) without the need to buy a new license, cancel an existing one, being forced to change license on a server to accept an additional domain, all this generating more work, invoicing, documentation, …
I really feel like this is really lost money for Virtualmin, donation is ok but always forgotten, so I think about it, and then more important pbms arise until the next … This license could eventually be limited to the number of servers, let’s say a global license for 10 servers, 50 servers, 100 servers, etc … you would have to switch to the new plan only when buying you 11th or 51th server …

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