Enhance should include a basic billing system

Adrien

I realize one of the big pain points in this industry is that Control Panel doesn't include billing.

I'd love to see a billing module included in Enhance that we can easily enable and disable, providing basic billing functionalities and connecting to Stripe/Paypal for payments. This would save us a lot of time and hassle trying to find and configure a third-party solution that is overkill for our needs.

When I say billing, it's only billing. I don't want to see any support ticketing system, Knowledge base, and all these features better developed and already available through specialized apps like our WordPress website, Live chat system etc.
We also don't want the billing to handle the emails to customers. Stripe allows us to send emails, and we can do this with our existing email system.

I want:

Connection to Stripe/Paypal
Manage suspensions/cancellations

I don't want in 2023:

Ticketing system. We have better and cheaper solutions, live chat...
Email marketing. Everyone has an email marketing solution already.
Customer CRM. We have this already.
Shopping cart. We don't need that. We have WordPress already and so many e-commerce solutions.
Saving my customer details and credit card info. We are in the age of data leaks. Stripe/paypal does it better than me and clients don't want me to store their details.

I'd like to add that Stripe has a complete anti-fraud solution and sales funnels with upsells, etc. Their checkout is perfectly optimized, and you'll get the best conversion rate.
It even offers a customer portal to manage their subscription. This is the path all payment providers are taking.
Please let the payment gateway handle the billing/security/invoicing. No intermediates.

Future is about bringing every specialized solution's best and clubbing them together.
Apps trying to do everything will end up doing nothing well.

Could you do that at Enhance and shake this 20-year status quo?

PS: I know this is the route some control panels are now taking, which will show end of the year. Example: Runcloud will soon include a billing system.

AdamM

Adrien
I support this idea and it is very good. Currently, using other tools is an additional cost and they don't always work as they should or there is a monopoly on things like whmcs.
Simple monthly or annual payments with stripe. Stripe has the best APIs and tools in the industry, so I don't think it will be a difficult task.

Adrien

AdamM Thanks Adam! I hope all the fellow members of Enhance community will actively support or comment on this Feature Request. We need many, many users to have a tiny little chance to convince Enhance to rethink their original idea of outsourcing this part.

AdamM

Adrien
I'm having trouble with this too.
Enhance billing system It doesn't have to be complicated at first.
My ideas:

Monthly, three-monthly and annual payments.
Integration with stripe and card payments
Pricing set from packages configuration.
Additional billing for disk and bandwidth usage. For example, $1 for each additional GB of disk space.
That's all.

AdamM

Enhance should be independent of other companies and their services as much as possible.

PradeepC

Extremely true! Would love to un-complicate things! Just one simple panel Enhance for billing and server management. Tickets, livechat, crm, etc can be integrated into other solutions!

mike

Well this idea is stretching the limits as you need invoicing, automation, client area, reports etc.. all in one place or integrated in some way. I think enhance should focus on CP dev rather on billing stuff. Enhance already has a lot to do.

On the other side, WHMCS is horrible. We switched from WHMCS before they dumped all their lifetime users. and it was a good choice.

Cheers !

Adrien

mike I agree with you,, but at the same time, this would be an incredible competitive feature.

What are you using right now?

You've mentioned these limits but:

1/ Invoicing. Stripe/Paypal does this. No, Enhance.
2/ Automation. Which one specifically are you referring to? For sure, there is user account creation/auto-provisioning but client almost has this already in enhance. It already has the Client UI, packages, and websites.
3/ Reports. The best reports are already there inside your payment gateway. Stripe offers a lot of reporting. So do Square and Paypal.

Have you dug into Stripe product management, funnels, customer portals, etc.? Or Squarespace?

There must be a way to have something lightweight without the bloat.

mike

Adrien What are you using right now?
We use hostbill and have that synced with quickbooks offline for accounting and tax bullshit. We use stripe as a payment processor.

invoicing: believe it or not our biggest clients never pay via stripe 😬
automation: we still do not use enhance. but we automate other products bundled in the order like a DNS template based on a specific product.
Reports: we have multiple sources of payment so we use qb for accurate financial reports & hostbill for provisioning/account reports.

Adrien There must be a way to have something lightweight without the bloat.
We have tried to remove the bloat by automating tasks lowering manual work but honestly it never ends.

Cheers !

Adam

In principle it would be easy for Enhance to add billing functionality to a subscription. However, in practice, most customers would need to bill other products - domains, addons, servers, etc all of which Enhance would need to support.

There are also lots of excellent billing solutions on the market.

Lastly, we want to focus on creating the best possible environment for hosting. I don't think we will ever exhaust the list of incoming feature requests. I don't want to say that Enhance will never provide billing functionality but it's not something on the horizon at the moment.

Adrien

Adam Thanks for your reply.

1/ Domains. More and more people don't want to sell domains. I see this as an old business and prefer people not to put all their eggs into the same basket (buying a domain from me). It makes more sense to buy from Google my domain, CF... The idea is to avoid buying the domain from your hosting company or your DNS provider. We want to teach this to our customers.
2/ Addons If you do WordPress hosting, I don't see any add-ons that need provisioning. We can bill this through Stripe or Paypal directly to our customers.
3/ Servers I thought this was a manual operation anyway. We need to set up the server and then use the "dedicated" option in the package to manually connect the client to the server post-purchase. That's, I think, how it's done today. Maybe I'm wrong.

Anyway, it was really nice to read your take on this, Adam, and I entirely understand your point.

I feel like driving a Porsche with Enhance, but I need to plug it into a truck. It's very frustrating.

Zoinkies

Adam Although I support the idea in principal, I don’t think it would be wise to conflict Enhance as a CP with a a basic CRM. Strict separation of concerns is more important than simplicity in some regards, I think It would be more ideal if in the future if the Enhance team wanted to make a CRM for Enhance it would be a separate offering with tight integration.

Ned

Adrien 3/ Servers I thought this was a manual operation anyway. We need to set up the server and then use the "dedicated" option in the package to manually connect the client to the server post-purchase. That's, I think, how it's done today. Maybe I'm wrong.

I think he meant that most hosting companies will either sell/resell some form of VPS/Dedicated server, In terms of addons you can think of like SSD vs NVME upgrades, dedicated IP, More RAM/Cores if that's how you setup your packages, Things harder to integrate into billing.

I like the idea, but onboarding has to be clean, WHMCS/Blesta and the others have eveything else down packed for features but for certain the one issue I have with them is leading people away to do things, Have this same issue with VPS provisioning - You have a billing account, A support system account, a vps control panel server account, a webhosting account and the user just has a poor experience.

Adrien

Zoinkies That's precisely my issue. I don't want any CRM. There are already fantastic CRM systems in the market.
Why do we have to add a CRM? The new brain is Stripe, or the payment gateway. From there, Zapier connects you to everything.

Adrien

Ned Selling add-ons such as a dedicated IP, additional RAM, or extra cores can't be done anyway. We have to upgrade the customer package in Enhance. We can create a product in Stripe for dedicated IP, more bandwidth, and more resources and use the API.

I, too, want to keep my customers on my website and Enhance.

While writing this, I thought a solid WordPress plugin could be this Enhanced billing solution. For example, using WooCommerce + Woo subscription to sell web hosting. wpclouddeploy does that well.

MD6

There are already powerful solutions out there that do billing, support, domain names, reporting, etc.

I think it's better for Enhance to focus on maturing its product rather than expanding into another dimension of web hosting.

Adrien

MD6 Sure. Do you know which one can leverage Enhance multiple locations and server role capabilities?

The title of my post was confusing sorry I can't edit it. I don't want Enhance to become a billing system but to plug into Stripe API, Square etc.. directly. Billing is handled directly through the payment gateway.

As you said there are lots of "powerful solutions out there that do billing, support, domain names, reporting, etc.," so we can get rid of WHMCS and run our business using something everyone already has: a payment processor.

MD6

Adrien Sure. Do you know which one can leverage Enhance multiple locations and server role capabilities?

With WHMCS, this is easily possible with the group and plan options. I haven't tested Enhance and WHMCS yet, but in my experience with WHMCS, everything happens during the customer's purchase process. He chooses a plan, a location and since everything is configured in WHMCS, the deployment will be done in the right server group under Enhance.

Two interesting links in the WHMCS documentation:
1- Products and Services
2- Products Management

For my part, the big irritant I see with Enhance's module for WHMCS is this: "We provide a basic module for WHMCS. All subscriptions provisioned under a WHMCS client will be created under the same organization (client) in Enhance".

Adrien As you said there are lots of "powerful solutions out there that do billing, support, domain names, reporting, etc.," so we can get rid of WHMCS and run our business using something everyone already has: a payment processor.

It's true that if you only need the billing, WHMCS is overkill.

kyzoeadmin

I am planning to build a module for perfexcrm, as the APi docs are more than clear. The PerfexCRM module will have a whois function too and integration for openprovider.

Adrien

mike Thanks for sharing Mike.