Hello all,

I was wondering if anyone knows of a free or cheap billing system that satisfies the following requirements:


Payment through Paypal, Check, Money Order (very important)
Integration with Cerberus Help Desk (important)
Automated Account Creation (very important)
Supports several account packages and features, etc. (important)
Checks domain name for validity
cPanel/WHM control panel (very important)
Basic administration panel including basic features like clients who have not paid yet, revenue statements, etc.
Customizable to fit a site's template


If so, can you please post the link here. Thanks in advance for your help. I appreciate it.

i dont think you get any free ones

Check out Whois.cart, I know for a fact it fits everything except maybe Cerberus. If you look on their forums I wrote how to integrate it with Cerberus, but that was a little while back so I am unsure if it still works (it should).

Http://www.whoiscart.net

The only other issue would be several packages with features. There is no ability to create "addon" features in whois.cart; however, you can create many packages (one for each configuration the user would end up with).

how about clientexec

There are a lot of web host billing softwares like Whois.Cart(), AWBS, ClientExec, ModernBill, WHMAutoPilot, Agilebill etc. Whois.Cart() is more easy and cheaper than others. Also some hosting companies provide a billing software free with their reseller hosting packages(for example Site5 offers ClientExec and Hostgator offers WHMAutoPilot).

I've been looking at Account Labs and Solid-State. Do their systems create accounts automatically?

Solid-State is an open source system correct? (making sure it is the one I am thinking of). If it is this one they it does not do auto-account creation yet.

That's right, Solid-State does not (yet) support auto-account creation.

What about Account Labs?

Update: Account Labs isn't free any more :-/

However, I've come across AHM at http://www.autohostmanager.com. It is in its beginning stages and I think it automates the hosting process. It's hosted by sourceforge and has the potential to be a pretty good open source project.

If you want to start hosting, I don't see why individuals or "business owners" want to go the free route. It costs money to make money, that is the best advise anyone could give any other member looking for a FREE solution when trying to SELL a product. If you want features you need to pay for them. Otherwise you will most likely run into a bad product that will indeed fail, or some kind of customer limit (with free billing software). So I suggest, if you want a program that auto-creates, and other various features you purchase it. Probably not the answer you were looking for, but your obviously shooting to make some money right? Well if yes, then you need to have reliable software ;)

HostFrog:

I agree with you, to make money you must spend money. There's no getting around that law. I just want to add an alternative point of view about open-source software, which sometimes gets confused with "free" (as in beer).

The objective of open source is to place a software package out there that a community can build upon, not just one small team of developers, with the hope that their collective talents can product something that is usefull to everyone. The end result can still be great quality software, and as open source projects such as Apache and Linux have shown us - sometimes better quality software. So I wouldn't try to discourage anyone from using a software package just because it's "free". If you truly want to avoid "bad" software, you can't evaluate the price tag alone, you need to have a look at the code.

I need something open source because I want to make modifications to it to support my helpdesk and modify it (I have some major addons I want to add to my hosting solution.)

HostFrog:

I agree with you, to make money you must spend money. There's no getting around that law. I just want to add an alternative point of view about open-source software, which sometimes gets confused with "free" (as in beer).

The objective of open source is to place a software package out there that a community can build upon, not just one small team of developers, with the hope that their collective talents can product something that is usefull to everyone. The end result can still be great quality software, and as open source projects such as Apache and Linux have shown us - sometimes better quality software. So I wouldn't try to discourage anyone from using a software package just because it's "free". If you truly want to avoid "bad" software, you can't evaluate the price tag alone, you need to have a look at the code.

This is well-said, and one of the main reasons I'd prefer open source, as we're in the process of writing our own in-house accounting system (which is more off-line), which I'd like to plugin to our hosting billing system (which is 24/7/365 online) CE seems to be a bit too "closed" for this. And most of the billing systems are too expensive, simply to try out for a while and then see it can't / doesn't work for us & with our system