WEWT!

Modernbill v4 is sweet!! Looks soooo nice!!

-hostriot.com

Yeah it does look pretty nice.. I still dont see how it is worth 700.00 though..

yea :( I was just about to buy it for $179. I went to the site just right now and its freggin $700!! errrrr. Anyone know where I can get it for cheaper maybe....

Yeah wait a couple months till they have 0 customers and they drop the price. I can even see paying 200.00 for the thing but 700!!! I think they got knocked off there rocker.. does look pretty sweet though..

Doubt you can get it anyhere else but them.

Wow thier price went to $700??? Whatever they're smokin, I sure wish they share it :D :stickout:

Well l see $700 is for developer version.. so thats for the ppl who may want to edit code, add features I guess.
:confused: For those who can edit it, why not make your own and save $700 ???

The regular price is $380.. however you can lease it for $25 /month :eek:

All that and it doesn't even integrate into 1 single Control Panel on market... :rolleyes: :eek:

that's a big price increase. i hope it's worth it!!

this sucks!! too expensive!

Yeah.. I was looking and was shocked last night...

For $700 bucks, I'll just do it myself.. It looks great, but damn....

Originally posted by The Prohacker
Yeah.. I was looking and was shocked last night...

For $700 bucks, I'll just do it myself.. It looks great, but damn....

I'd personally have a lot more interest in your version of such software than theirs.

Looks like PhpManager just got bumped to #1 on my list..

Any others to worth lookin at???

$380 is not expensive if it works. I tried the demo and it didn't work, kept getting Invalid ID errors anytime I tried to view a record. Could be that they still have a few things to work out. Best to wait for 4.1.

Originally posted by Esr Tek
Looks like PhpManager just got bumped to #1 on my list..

Any others to worth lookin at???

lol!
You can say that again!

They must be working to pay off that pixelbrick.com design they made for them, heh.

Modernbill can be intergrated with any control panel.

I was able to intergrate it with:

CPanel
Ensim
Plesk
Virtuozzo (took alot of work)

Thank you

I'll go ahead and post this before someone asks what the URL is:

http://www.modernbill.com :D

LOL Ben :stickout: :D

HostInspect - How did you get it integrated into Cpanel? I can't code but can pay :D PM me if needed
I'd be willing to shell out 3-6 mnths of leased at $25 to check it out if only it works w Cpanel/WHm ;)

Originally posted by Esr Tek
LOL Ben :stickout: :D

HostInspect - How did you get it integrated into Cpanel? I can't code but can pay :D PM me if needed
I'd be willing to shell out 3-6 mnths of leased at $25 to check it out if only it works w Cpanel/WHm ;)

I think thats what v4 was made for, along with all the other control panels such as plesk, ensim, etc...

oh and the new look ;)

Can I ask wtf it does :D

Looks somewhat overwhelming to be honest :)

i takes care of pretty much everything for you to be organized, and keep track of you clients, income your making, etc...

lol, $700 eh :) Program made for the big boys :D

lol, yea

Its way over priced though :\

If people were smart... Get a bunch of companies to chip in a little money and goto something like elance and get some of those code heads to program your own.

What's the url?




:D

Your guys need to look a little closer, the 700 dollar version is to get the comlete source code version. If you dont plan on customizing it, and adding modules then there are other options An owned license 379. Granted the price may be a little steep, but they do provide other options. Perhaps v4 has put their software way paste all the other competition.

I wouldn't own an encoded PHP script..

If I'm going to buy a PHP script, its going to be for the reason I can customize it easily.. vB, etc...

And frankly, why pay all that money if you can't use the modules??? Hell might as well invest in Excel and do it by hand then..

Perhaps try negociating with their sales dept. I have used it for over a year and i would have to say it is very very nice script. it is a lot better than those pay per customer jobs along with monthly fees.

$700 is not that much of a cost for a great product like this. I don't see what everyone's problem is?

If you can afford a server you can afford modernbill. Better to get things setup before you start getting 300-400 clients. We made the mistake of not purchasing a online product, now we have 250 users in an excel database.

If modernbill was around when we started we would have bought it. $700 is a little cost to incur for automation.

I'm glad I hired a coder and graphic designer last month :D

Prolly cost me more, but at least it's exactly what I want! :P

Thanks for all the comments.

I'll have to say that Ceonex has done a superb job working with us helping us with our marketing and business model. We have noticed lots of people drawing conclusions about ModernBill, Price increases, added services, extended pricing models. It comes down to this... our company is expanding, our product is becoming a format that will touch all sizes of hosting companies, and we want to make sure it is available for all customers in the market. That is why we offered the leased price at a very reasonable monthly.

Let's think about growth and added features. Do you expect the price of ModernBill to stay static with added features and advanced server connection modules? This is due to added support cost, added programmers, and added research. It's your basic funding/profit dilemma. All companies go through it and we opt to offer many tiers of pricing to accommodate our clients. Developing software takes human resources, time and money.

The realistic fact is that ModernBill will simplify your hosting business with automatic recurring billing, email administration, domain registration, and provisioning of accounts. We will continue to develop this product with the hosting companies as our focus in this project. The pricing may seem difficult to swallow at first, but it is relative to the size of your company. If you are not a Developer, don't purchase the Developer License and purchase the tier that is affordable to your company... you can always upgrade if needed.

We appreciate your comments... as always, but let’s think like business people in this forum. The formula is very simple and we have always kept the price affordable to our clients.

Thank you for your support and we look forward to a successful v4 release,

ModernBill

Yea, I understand :\

But why from $290 to $700? Huge difference :/

Wells its real nice! but I no longer can afford it. Right when I was about to buy it too, :bawling:

-hostriot.com

I hope you modernbill guys have cleared up all the bugs in this new release.. the previous one had a number of bad bugs that you did not even both to fix or address.

We corrected all bugs that were posted on our support forums. There were a few that could only be addressed in v4 as they required more than a few lines of code rewritin.

v4 has been in beta testing for over 1 month and the RC is actually build number 25.

As for the price increase, there were several factors. Please note you can still modify these sections in the encoded versions:

All config files
All translation files
All order form templates
All theme templates

This represents about 20% of the code base.

My only question problem is this...
Let me say first I understand our pricing structure and was glad to see the leased version ;)

Ok so my problem is...
I am not a coder (so therefore wouldn't normally buy Developer teir). However I would have to buy the developer so I can get it integrated into Cpanel and pay someone else (who knows how much) to get it integrated.

I understand it's purpose and frankly I've seen why its so much better than others.
However how can you have not 1 single CP integrated into it for such amounts? (even leased tier is $300 yr :eek: )

I'm not trying to flame or belittle you in anyway.. just kinda shocked that the "best one" (not words from your mouth) doesn't have features it's rivals do for so much cheaper!!

Cpanel intergration has been promised for so long and still isn't in the product phpmanager at $50usd is great :D

Woohoo.. I'm happy I bought it a week ago :D

Originally posted by diederik
Woohoo.. I'm happy I bought it a week ago :D

hehehe good timeing ;)

Here si a short list of the modules you can expect from us within the next several weeks. Many have already been started as we needed basic logic to develop a robust API.

http://65.18.157.198/features/index.htm?type=modules

Our API support 3 types of modules: server, registrar, and gateway

When teh modules are done and tested, you will be able to dwnlaod them from our support are at no cost to you as long as your support membershp is up to date.

We will also support MORE THAN ONE module installed at a time....

Example:

You register domains with enom (.us) and opensrs (.com, .net) ... etc. If you have both modules enabled, then teh system will dispatch accordingly when it comes time to process the queue.

The same goes for servers when the logic is added to support this (currently you can only have one server module active, but we will support multiple server modules soon)

As for gateways, usualy the major gateway is all that is needed, so there is no immediate plans to support more than one at a time (IE Authent and Echo both enabled)

All API commands are sent to our new API Queue. The queue then dispatches to the module according to what is enabled and configured.

---

This is what we have planned for you. :)

i really do hope they have the cpanel integration, it was promised a long time ago :(

Originally posted by MBill Admin
Do you expect the price of ModernBill to stay static with added features and advanced server connection modules?

ammmm yes:homer:

Firstly I think the move to version 4 could have been better, we are a customer and paid for the full source version less than a month ago, we still don't have access to either the forum or the download site even after opening a support ticket and emailing mbill we are still no further forward to either of them, I'm not looking for help from this forum just pointing out that a mis-handled change-over like this can leave a bad taste in customers mouths, one which is hard to get rid of.

Secondly I think the logic used to justify the price increases etc is slightly flawed. If mbill is now aiming at a wider market how does it hope to attract them? Let me qualify this. Generally speaking mbill is only really useful to a new host, usually not in a position or not willing to risk $700 on a piece of billing software and may not even see the need at this starting point. Yes you have a leased option but we pretty much dislike any sort of onging costs for software etc.

So, why wouldn't an established host swap to mbill, well we have been going for 3 years, have just over 1000 clients and over 4500 packages - maybe we fit right into one ceonix's little target groups, but what has V4 done to help us get our 1000 clients and 4500 packages into mbill? Doesn't look like much. We calculated around 350 hours work just setting up our clients in mbill, that's at 20 minutes per client, so 2 months solid work to do this and it still doesn't handle monthly payments as we use worldpay. In essence it's making our life harder and increasing the opportunity of losing clients.

Don't get me wrong I like mbill, we may even continue to use it, not sure as yet

just my 2 cents :)

Nothing special - for those who have purchased the product prior to the release of 4.0 - do they get the new version for free or what?

time-to-go I fully agree with you, it's such a pain in the ar*e getting clients to pay every month, what if they take a holiday?

Get futurepay and modernbill intergrated oh and cpanel and i will be one happy man.

Originally posted by modernbill
Here si a short list of the modules you can expect from us within the next several weeks. Many have already been started as we needed basic logic to develop a robust API.

http://65.18.157.198/features/index.htm?type=modules

Our API support 3 types of modules: server, registrar, and gateway

When teh modules are done and tested, you will be able to dwnlaod them from our support are at no cost to you as long as your support membershp is up to date.

We will also support MORE THAN ONE module installed at a time....

Example:

You register domains with enom (.us) and opensrs (.com, .net) ... etc. If you have both modules enabled, then teh system will dispatch accordingly when it comes time to process the queue.

The same goes for servers when the logic is added to support this (currently you can only have one server module active, but we will support multiple server modules soon)

As for gateways, usualy the major gateway is all that is needed, so there is no immediate plans to support more than one at a time (IE Authent and Echo both enabled)

All API commands are sent to our new API Queue. The queue then dispatches to the module according to what is enabled and configured.

---

This is what we have planned for you. :) ¨


Give me 1 reason why we at WHT shouldnt work together on this one, and chip in a few hundred dollars each and build together a better script then modernbill?

because we are lazy and untrusting?

I for one do not mind the price increase. The mbill guys are right, with all these new modules and the features that they have, the price is just right.

True, if you are switching to mbill from something else and you have a lot of clients, a lot of time will be spent putting them into the system. but A LOT more time will be saved once they are in the system.

mbill, in my opinion, is very robust and feature packed and i think v4 will be even more so.

Simply put, good programming doesn't come cheap. If you can't afford it, or dont want to pay the hefty price tag, program your own or use something else, but quit bitching about it.

The only beef I have with mbill is that I still can not access the members area to download v4 (mbill please pm me with this info!!!!!

I just ordered it and got my account acticvated :)

But im having trouble installing it...I getting fatal errors :(

Originally posted by hosticle
for those who have purchased the product prior to the release of 4.0 - do they get the new version for free or what?

Well I've just downloaded it (customer from back when it was only $80 :D), so yes. So far Modernbill are keeping to their promise from day one that as long as your support period is paid and up to date new versions are available.

It's still not quite what we're looking for yet, but it's very close.

Greg Moore

Hey Modernbill:

Here's a possible suggestion. You have a large group of people that wish they got in on the MB bandwagon before the v4 release so they could get the package at the previous rates. Why not setup a WHT coupon, or maybe setup a group rate if x people get into the group buy?

Would be a large number of buys in a short time!
-WC-

Nice looking, but with everyone else, I'm not going to pay that kind of money. I'd rather spend the extra time and customize one for myself...save the extra $700 for a few months price on a dedicated server.

Well, it's not $700, unless you want the source code.

I think it was $270 for a full license, right?

-WC-

What are the features, dynamitehost? Does it support recurring billing?

I already signed up for Modern Bill's version 3, thankfully, so I'll be able to get the new version for free. Not sure if I will even need the new version, because I think the older version does everything I need it to do anyway. I mean, how many non-essential addons do you really want? All I need it for is to integrate with authorize.net / give me a form for my clients to signup with / recurring billing options / and finally, ways to keep track of clients within the system. But if there were a program that only gave me those first three options -- hey that would be perfect!

Maybe they should offer version 3 for those who would like to pay $170 (with no additional upgrades, obviously) and those who really really want version 4 can buy it with their new price.

I'm babbling ... but hey what's a forum for anyway?

what is so good about version 4 except for the looks?? :confused:

I would like to know...

All I know is that you can now have modules addon, but are they available??

I seriously do not see why you guys are bashing the ModernBill Team. They have all rights to charge whatever price they want to charge. After all, that is what we all do when we charge others for (dedicated servers, shared hosting, reseller plans, web designs, etc.)

If you can afford a Bently and want it, buy it.
If you can afford ModernBill and want it, buy it.

It's not like a person who can't afford an expensive home/car/whatever goes around complaining to the company that they have no money or are not willing to pay a high price for their product. Although, 700$ is a high price....=D

I am sure they may consider a possible 'coupon' with WHT members. Then again, I may be wrong.

MBill admin said he would let me download the demo version for academic/educational purposes since I'm a student doing a project in php, it would be a blessing to see what goes in that code.

But the links aren't working for the free demo?

we have developed similar script in asp and it has many more features than mbill/phpmanager, but it is not intregrated with any cc processor or CP, we are soon going to be porting this on PHP/MySQL.

i'm getting my own coded to fit my use - but i dont plan on selling it or anything. mbill looks great, but i figure i can get my own done with only half of the features (required features)

You really think that you can program your own in such a way that it's worth not just paying out the $360 or whatever MB is now?

Do the math. How many hours do you think it would take to make a project of this size? Don't forget, you have to research the methodologies of interfacing with other billing setups, make it be functional and look pretty.

So, you divide $360 by those X hours. That's now how much you saved an hour doing it yourself. Here's some examples:

If you were superman and coded it in 4 hours, you saves $90/hr.
If you were superman, but took your time (6 hrs), that's $60/hr.
12 hours - $30/hr
24 hours - $15/hr
48 hours - $7.50/hr
90 hours - $4.00/hr

I code PHP pretty efficiently, but I can't see doing something with all the proper research and preparation taking any small amount of time. I think the best bet would be to group-buy like the guy in releated offers is doing with vBullitin. It's normally $160 or something and he's trying to get a group in on getting it for $100-110.

Anyways, good luck!
-WC-

Originally posted by Johan H
Give me 1 reason why we at WHT shouldnt work together on this one, and chip in a few hundred dollars each and build together a better script then modernbill?

No one is stopping you.

Originally posted by WildCard
Do the math. How many hours do you think it would take to make a project of this size? Don't forget, you have to research the methodologies of interfacing with other billing setups, make it be functional and look pretty.

So, you divide $360 by those X hours. That's now how much you saved an hour doing it yourself. Here's some examples:

If you were superman and coded it in 4 hours, you saves $90/hr.
If you were superman, but took your time (6 hrs), that's $60/hr.
12 hours - $30/hr
24 hours - $15/hr
48 hours - $7.50/hr
90 hours - $4.00/hr

Do the math, now imagine if you could sell 3 copies (just 3) of that software, that was able to compete 100% with modernbill to 3 WHT members at $120 per sale, you would have made back the money you would have spent and gotten yourself a control for yourself on top of that.

Now lets look at how many labor hours of coding went into the linux kernel and figure that one out :p

AcronymBoy,

never thought about reselling the work once done. Does sort of put a spin on the results. Hmm, I still think a group buy with MB would be easiest.

I will email them and see what they have to say.
-WC-

I would like to make a few observations here...

Our goal is not to rip you off or anyone else for that matter. We think our software has grown quite nicely over time (about 1 year so far) ... but it is no where near the completed product we hope to have one day. We are in continuous development and all license holders will benefit from our efforts by keeping their support membership active. (This means free updates and upgrades as well as any modules we create for active members!)

There is a major difference between our previous versions (1,2,3) and our newest version (4) aside from the GUI, and this the new API. It was a huge undertaking on our part with more than 6 months in development as we had to restructure most of the underlying logic. The new API allows us the flexibility of plugging in various modules to communicate with third-party systems.

For example: The Server API will work with Plesk, Ensim, cPanel, Sphera, etc. The Registrar API will work with OpenSRS, eNom, etc. The Gateway API will work with ... (too many to list).

All of this is possible now if v4. It was still possible in v3, but each add-on would have taken entirely too much development. Se we decided to put that work into our API. Now we will be able to write modules or outsource them as needed in a much more proficient manner and faster pace than ever before.

I see a lot of you are stuck on the price of the developers version, which is only 1 of 6 versions available. We also have a leased version for $14.95 - $24.95 per month and owned versions from $279 - $379 with no hidden upgrade costs. (Please note that this is not meant to be an advertisement.)

There is only one difference between eh developer version and the owned/leased versions ... and that is the inclusion of 98% source code. However, with the non-source versions you can still edit the following:

- all theme files (basically the entire GUI, both admin and user side)
- all order form templates (you control the header and footer)
- all config files (most of the config is stored in the db)
- all translation files (change any string, anywhere)

ModernBill has over 300 configuration setting and when modules are ready, all you will need to do is upload and configure them via the GUI.

We have a lot of clients who think they need the full source code version, but we have found over time that most do not. They can make all if the display changes or config changes either in the GUI or config/theme files themselves. Only the core business logic is encoded and can not be modified....and most of the time people suggest the changes they want, and we make them for them. But if you still need the source, we have that too.

So I could see your point if we only offered one solution, but I hope now you see that we have a variety of soutions for every price range.

If you made it this far, thanks for listening.

i just want to reiterate that I support Mbills price increase. As I've said in a previous thread about VB, programmers do not grow on trees. If you don't like the price, program it yourself and quit bitching about it. No one is forcing you to buy...

i just want to reiterate that I support Mbills price increase.
But thats not in keeping with your moto "Customers Before Profits! Always!". :)


I couldn't agree more. People always bitch about price and never realize how hard it realy is. They think "A little HTML, A little Script, A little Time, and some Fairy dust - and whalla- a program that runs your back office." :rolleyes:

The price increase does not worry me, if you run a serious hosting business you should be ready to fork up some $$$. However, in saying that if I'm ready to fork our $700 or so, I want a ROCK SOLID piece of software to power my business... I don't want bugs or problems or glitches, minor ones are okay but sometimes I just ask myself why MBILL has so many problems previously.. The 3.1.2 version is pretty much stable now, I hope everytime you release something you FULLY beta-test, rather than get your paying customers to test your software.

I'm not looking forward to this upgrade - we had *major* problems when we upgraded the last time (from 2.x to 3.x) - to the point where a large number of our customers were double-billed because for some reason the new version refused to recognize credits that were entered in the old version. It's fixed and working now, but, wow, was that a pain. I sure hope the migration path of the new one is more seamless!

By the way - I haven't looked at the demo yet - I couldn't get into the ModernBill web site without having horrendously bad music blaring out of my computer speakers, and I had to shut the browser down before I could get to see anything. Hope you change that, there's nothing more annoying than hitting a web site with music.

Jason

Jeez... I just turned on my speakers.. That explains the extremely long download time of their site.. :)

music = bad
eurotrash dance pop = badder :D

Greg Moore