Web Hosting Network is creating a fully automated billing software designed around web hosting companies. The release date is set for a few weeks yet, but our beta is already live and works great!

Check it out Here! (http://www-hosting.net/billing.html)

You can also signup for our mailing list and be notified when the release date will be set

Very interesting, keep us updated to when its fully developed.

Superman,

Looks good from the screen shots. I would be interested in trying out a demo when it is complete. What is the cost going to be of the completed script? I have also signed up for your mailing list. Look forward to its release.

This looks very promising so far. I'll be very interested in seeing it when it's done.

I do have one suggestion (at least one initial suggestion - I may have more later) - it looks, from the screen shots, that you have the billing cycle (i.e. monthly, quarterly, etc.) associated to the account plan. Although this is very common among the billing programs I've evaluated, I think this is the wrong way to do this. I really think it's much better to have the biling cycle associated to the customer directly.

For example, let's say we have 4 hosting plans (plan 1, plan 2, plan 3, and plan 4), and we accept payments on a monthly, quarterly, 6 months, or annual basis. That means we must set up 16 different plans in the system to accomplish that. And what happens when someone who has a Plan 2 - Quarterly decides that they want to change their billing cycle to monthly? We'd have to delete the plan from their account and add the Plan 2 - Monthly plan.

It's must easier if you just have 4 plans set up, and then define the billing cycle on a per-customer basis. If a customer changes billing cycles, you don't have to remove the old plan and add a new one, you just change the billing cycle.

Makes things a lot easier and less confusing for all involved (and, if you have web access where the customer can make modifications themselves - I didn't notice if you do have that, but if you do, the billing cycle is another item that the customer could change themselves).

Oh - one other comment I just thought of while I was typing this. You should have a "Setup Fee" setting on each package. Even if a host doesn't have setup fees, they can just set that to zero.

There is one other feature that is really needed that I don't think I've ever seen in a billing product (or if it's there I've just missed it), and that's the ability to set up specific add-on items on a per-domain basis. Usually you have to set up add-on items as a plan and add that addition "plan" to the account. The problem comes in for customers (and especially resellers) who have multiple domain names - you start adding like 30 Bronze plans, and 10 of them have a stats add-on and 5 have extra e-mail accounts and 15 have SQL databases, and so on, the billing gets very very confusing for that customer (it doesn't matter on our end - we're expecting the money for the entire account to be paid all at once, but from the customers' end they may have to take our invoice and turn around and use it to bill their own clients - which is difficult when you don't really knwo what you're being billed for). If the individual addons can be applied to a specific domain, then that's helpful.

The invoices would look something like:

- Account Plan $price
- Add-on $price
- Add-on $price
$total price
- Account Plan $price
- Add-on $price
$total price

$invoice total

It'd be a great feature to have.

Well, off the top of my head that's all I can think of, but if I notice anything else, I'll post it here.

Oh, yeah - one more thing - please make it compatible with AuthorizeNet - it shouldn't be too hard to do.

Thanks,

Jason