Input Enormous price increases yet again for 2025

[Gary W.]

It's every year the same. See the other thread here: Question - Massive price increase for reseller licenses?. Sigh.

And like Maarten said; it's because they have shareholders behind the Investment Group. Prices will increase every year and also every other product in the WebPros portfolio e.g. SolusVM, WHMCS, cPanel, etc... All will be increased every single year, over and over...

You can inform the investors that I am currently evaluating free platforms to host my network of websites. Plesk is fortunate because I have numerous online projects that I cannot afford to take offline in case of migration issues. However, I am gradually transitioning to CloudPanel and Webmin. This change won't happen overnight, but it is inevitable.

Plesk is a powerful tool, but the monthly subscription feels more like extortion than proper license management. I already canceled my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription at the beginning of 2024 after 8 years, switching to Photopea + AI and DaVinci Resolve as alternatives to Photoshop and Premiere Pro.

I’m not afraid of change, especially now that I have Anthropic Claude supporting me with server customizations.

We are also a Hetzner client, and we are not pleased that we are now forced to order directly from Plesk, as we do not need the additional support included in their direct pricing model.

Currently, we hold numerous licenses for the Web PRO Edition at a price of €11.66 per month. Going forward, the price for new licenses will be €22.99 per month, representing an increase of 97.2%. I do not blame Hetzner—they are simply summarizing what is currently wrong with Plesk:

"The provider's expansive pricing strategy and the low customer demand have prompted us to take this step." (ChatGPT translation)

Nevertheless, this decision will gradually prompt us to move away from Plesk. New servers will have the opportunity to be built on alternative solutions.

I remember the golden days of 2018 when I could purchase the Admin Pro license for €6.20 directly through Hetzner invoicing, without dealing with Plesk’s website. Now, that's gone, and the license costs €18.29 per month. They’re kind enough to offer a discount to €10.98, which is still almost double the price in 2018.

While Plesk has improved significantly over the years, it hasn’t improved enough to justify this price hike. In fact, with all the new features, it has become more complex and resource-intensive than it used to be. Currently, I’ve downgraded to the Web Admin plan, limiting my sites to just 10 projects. All new projects will be deployed directly through Debian + Webmin to familiarize myself with it, aiming to eventually migrate everything there in 3-6 months.

 

[Gary W.]

It was inspired by yours

Anyway, tonight I'm migrating to CloudPanel. The first site went smoothly, now it's time for the other 9.
In the meantime, I got a refund for the Plesk license I purchased during Black Friday.

 

[SDGPete]

I understand that this situation is not ideal and I can see that there is constructive criticism in your feedback. Thank you, it is invaluable. I would like to encourage anyone willing to share their input on what improvements/features would in your opinion justify a price increase, what changes you would like to see in the future, even your own view of better structure of the licensing. Thank you in advance.

Sebahat, that part of your reply in bold is quite laughable!

There is literally a whole suggestion forum on Uservoice of Plesk's customer base begging for features, improvements or just fixes and we're told "Don't forget to vote for this feature" and we're left to cross our fingers and hope. Meanwhile, we get updates containing features that are nice but not necessarily wanted or critical (the facelift that no one wanted for example).

Then there are all the items that have over or near a 1000 votes and they're not implemented or they are then we have to pay a subscription on top of the increased licensing costs.

So it translates as this.

• Paying customers ask for features/improvements on uservoice and have to vote.
• Plesk raises prices
• Plesk releases features but not the ones that customers ask for on Uservoice
• Plesk raises prices and says "Look at all these new benefits....the ones you didn't ask for"
• Customers continue to ask for features on Uservoice and vote and get ignored.
• Plesk sort of completes the top request on Uservoice which was to integrate Clam AV which is a free product, but Plesk decides to make that an additional subscription (paying for something that's free!)
• Plesk raises prices and says "Remember those features you didn't ask for, well we still need to cover the costs of those"
• Customers come on here to complain about prices rises
• Sebahat comments on here: Anyone willing to share their input on improvements/features that would justify price increases (Because we're still ignoring the ones that we asked you for on uservoice).

Can you see how easy it is to become disillusioned with Plesk and frustrated with price continual price increases? I don't even bother wasting time on Uservoice anymore, I don't want to give Plesk ideas on what they can license separately out of their core product to make more money.

Also the facelift that no one asked for, it's actually made Plesk harder to work with. We have 100's of domains/subscriptions per server, previously we were able to have multiple tabs open for the same server but for different domains. Now because it's using ajax more by way of a cookie you can only work on one domain at a time. Any previous tabs you had open for other domains will switch and default to the last active domain/tab on refresh.

 

[Gary W.]

Only a company in a monopolistic position can use a phrase like, "Anyone willing to share their input on improvements/features that would justify price increases." They are overly confident that users won’t stop using Plesk despite the price hikes. And, to some extent, they’re right. Those who manage multiple Plesk servers today are often forced to find the time and resources to migrate everything to platforms that are often less comprehensive than Plesk.

I used to be in that situation myself until I rolled up my sleeves and switched to free panels. It was a true relief because the issue isn't the monthly cost itself, but rather the feeling of having no control over the license. We have no idea how much it will cost in five years. These constraints are absurd, especially considering the availability of free and highly capable panels today.

 

[SDGPete]

Only a company in a monopolistic position can use a phrase like, "Anyone willing to share their input on improvements/features that would justify price increases." They are overly confident that users won’t stop using Plesk despite the price hikes. And, to some extent, they’re right.

IF Plesk actually improved the core product, completed the features and suggestions over on Uservoice instead of adding "Works in progress" to it I might have more of a view point of "They're actually working hard towards giving people what they want, the increase is less bitter to swallow" but I'm not seeing that. A lot of the updates are ways for Plesk to stealth further revenue streams into the product by way of affiliation (making money from my clients without my knowledge or permission). Like one of the stealth updates "Click here to find a Wordpress partner to work on your site", literally inviting competitors in to our customers.

As an example of a feature that's only half cooked, we don't sell hosting as a separate product, we're a design and development company, all of the sites being hosted are one's we've produced and use Plesk as a way for our designers to create hosting environments on the servers without hassle. Now it's becoming increasing popular for clients to have multiple 3rd party service providers working for them that may need access to hosting. Which isn't a problem for clients that just have one site within a customer account. However when you have clients with multiple sites within their customer account there is no way to be able to limit a 3rd parties access to just a selection of sites, you can only choose between one specific subscription or all of them which is a data protection nightmare.

 

[Sebahat.hadzhi]

Thank you for your feedback, @SDGPete . I understand the price increase is a good enough reason for frustration among Plesk users and my intention was far from causing further frustration, but hearing feedback on what changes you would like to see in future. By the collective feedback, I can see that many of you would prefer a simplistic panel over the additional features added. My attempt to gather feedback is to be provided as a common ground for future decisions and attempt to alight the users' needs with the long-term goals of Plesk as much as possible.

Regarding UserVoice, determining which features/improvements to introduce with priority is a complex decision and, unfortunately, sometimes there are other factors that contribute as much as user demand.

 

[SDGPete]

@Sebahat.hadzhi your reply hasn't given me any further confidence unfortunately. Plesk's use of UserVoice is again laughable, "user demand"? There are so many items that have received high votes and have not been implemented, some going back more than 10 years! Uservoice is literally recording and visualising user demand but it's ignored. You can't ask for users feedback and then ignore it or even worse, anger customers by saying you've completed an item which is considered to be a basic necessity (ClamAV) and then monetising it.

I appreciate you're making an effort at the moment to get feedback to better understand users, change our perception of Plesk perhaps, well ticking items off of that list would be a good start. In my opinion, whilst that list is still unresolved, there is no greater indicator that Plesk doesn't listen to it's customer base.

Also Uservoice is flawed, there are so many suggestions and requests that anything new added to the list doesn't get seen because it's so far at the back of the list, we can't be expected to trawl through pages of suggestions as a collective and vote. There has to be a better way.

 

[Maarten]

@SDGPete:
I completely understand where you're coming from, and I share many of your frustrations. The disconnect between highly upvoted UserVoice requests and the features that actually get implemented is a recurring point of contention.

To Plesk's credit, they have made some effort to improve transparency. For example, after suggestions from the community (myself included), they started tagging implemented features in the changelog with "As per UserVoice request." While this doesn’t solve the broader issues, it does help us see which requests are being acted on.

That said, I think a lot of frustration comes from two other key issues:

1. The rapid addition of features no one asked for: Plesk seems to be adding new features at breakneck speed, but many of these are not priorities for users. The time spent on these could arguably be better spent addressing long-standing UserVoice requests or fixing existing bugs.
2. Features that feel incomplete: There’s also a tendency to release features that aren’t fully polished. This creates more issues for admins, who already deal with daily frustrations caused by unresolved bugs in the core system. These half-finished implementations only add to the feeling that Plesk is rushing features out the door without considering the real-world impact.

Ultimately, the combination of ignored UserVoice requests, unpolished features, and persistent bugs erodes trust in the platform. Perhaps what would help is if Plesk could communicate more openly about why certain requests aren't prioritized or provide a roadmap that outlines their reasoning. This would help manage expectations and make the development process feel less like a black box.

At the end of the day, UserVoice exists to align development priorities with customer needs. When that alignment feels missing, and when new features appear that don’t address pressing issues, it’s easy to see why users become disillusioned.

 

[manni]

Hello everyone,

I would like to give some more reaction on this price increase topic, maybe interesting for others too. This is reaction is based on some sleepless nights, thinking on this story.

First of all, I really would like highlight, that of course price increases seem to be extreme; on the other hand honestly said, Plesk is the only basis component (except the host itself) that is needed to operate a hosting infrastructure. A Plesk License costs regulary € 34,- a month (WebHost VPS) which of course is money, but on the other hand it is nothing. Let's say that you operate 100 hosting subscriptions on your server, that this would mean for € 3,40 you have everything settled for this customer.

I have also deep dived now into alternative solutions, also open source products. Some of them look promising, others not. At least here in my case I have to say, that the GUI design is something that is important for our customers as well, and also reaction time. This all costs money.

We have now also received the first invoice for ELS, which caused a lot of headache to me. We are charged around € 3,- per month for ELS including TuxCare which is nothing and at least we here see this quite positive. This gives us time, to change our old services from PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.6 (yep, a big topic for us, as 75% of our services still operate unter PHP 5.3; we just did a shutdown of a PHP 5.1 instance).

The one point, that I really do not understand - and this really is a pain in the *** (sorry for the wording) - is the fact, that our Plesk License reseller informed us, that WebPros discontinues the way to buy licenses through partners with immediate effect. Direct licensing through WebPros causes many issues for us:
1. Prices are higher (we had up to 40% discount)
2. CreditCard (or alternatives) are must with Direct Purchase Orders; no way to do post-invoicing including manual bank transfer
3. We have no central license management

Partners are still authorized to sell Licenses, but only in combination with Hosting Infrastructure. In our case, we operate own infrastructure and now cannot do licensing on this platform. One exception for this are Plesk Distributors; but they informed us now (upon our request) that further changes in regards to WebPros products will come up soon.

I have also applied to become Plesk partner directly with immediat response from WebPros account management, that no more partners are accepted. How crazy is this?

For me, it is not about 15 Euros up or down, for me the way of communication is the horror thing. Big changes over the night, making things more complicated than easier.

br
Manuel

P.S.: For sure there are people using Plesk for private servers etc. where money is a topic. But for everyone else, honestly said, and sorry to be really direct (and don't take it negative): If you are not able to afford € 34,- per month, as the only software you need for operating the hosting platform, I would recommend to think about switch to another business case.

 

[Gary W.]

P.S.: For sure there are people using Plesk for private servers etc. where money is a topic. But for everyone else, honestly said, and sorry to be really direct (and don't take it negative): If you are not able to afford € 34,- per month, as the only software you need for operating the hosting platform, I would recommend to think about switch to another business case.

Here, we are all capable of paying € 34 to host 100 sites; that has never been in question. What we dislike is the constant increase in the license price. Considering it's practically a lifetime subscription (until you switch panels), the whole situation feels like extortion. Just as you say - it is not about 15 Euros up or down" - for us, it’s not about the €34 per month.

Moreover, if you think € 34 per month isn’t much, keep in mind that with a 23% annual increase, over 10 years you would end up spending € 219 a month—for what exactly?

I know it’s difficult to truly see numbers for what they are, especially with monthly subscriptions. However, I’ve created a table assuming a 23% annual price increase starting from your €34 per month. As you can see, after 10 years, with a 23% annual increase, the figures reach absurd levels that are nowhere near justified by the optimizations made to Plesk or even by inflation.

Year	Monthly Price (€)	Annual Cost (€)	Annual Increase (%)
2025	34	408	-
2026	42	502	+23%
2027	51	617	+23%
2028	63	759	+23%
2029	78	934	+23%
2030	96	1.149	+23%
2031	118	1.413	+23%
2032	145	1.738	+23%
2033	178	2.137	+23%
2034	219	2.629	+23%

Final note: consider that even Linux, which runs on your machine, could have been a paid product, as could Fail2Ban, MariaDB, phpMyAdmin, and the list goes on. If you start accepting a 23% annual increase, even on small amounts, your expenses will quickly escalate. This will lead you to put pressure on your clients, who will then consider alternative solutions.

This is how the market works, but it seems we are no longer willing to stay on the Plesk merry-go-round.

 

[D3nnis3n]

Thank you for your feedback, @SDGPete . I understand the price increase is a good enough reason for frustration among Plesk users and my intention was far from causing further frustration, but hearing feedback on what changes you would like to see in future. By the collective feedback, I can see that many of you would prefer a simplistic panel over the additional features added. My attempt to gather feedback is to be provided as a common ground for future decisions and attempt to alight the users' needs with the long-term goals of Plesk as much as possible.

Regarding UserVoice, determining which features/improvements to introduce with priority is a complex decision and, unfortunately, sometimes there are other factors that contribute as much as user demand.

That's not really adding any confidence. I mean you can add as many features to Plesk as you want, but it seems you requested from us what kind of features we want to be willing to pay these insane prices, which is a horrible way to communicate to begin with when people are telling you that the prices are too high.

How about considering offering better licensing tiers with cheaper options that retain the core functionalities but remove all the bloat? The licensing is severely limited as well - I would like to have the Server Provider view, as the dashboard is indeed a great feature, but to get that I need to buy the Pro license that gives 30 domains (which I don't need, as I have multiple servers with less than 10 domains each), Client Management and Wordpress Plugin. I don't need all of that. A Web Admin license with that view is sufficient, it's much more comfortable to use to me, but it's locked behing licensing. Web Admin also simply feels to pricey. There has been inflation, but not that much!

P.S.: For sure there are people using Plesk for private servers etc. where money is a topic. But for everyone else, honestly said, and sorry to be really direct (and don't take it negative): If you are not able to afford € 34,- per month, as the only software you need for operating the hosting platform, I would recommend to think about switch to another business case.

Yes, a dozen of such private servers. While it was affordable with VPS licenses from my host that stopped selling them that was a great way to use it. Now they get no money from me at all anymore, as paying double the price as so far at Plesk directly is not acceptable for my use. They can offer me a fitting license model and take my money additionally to their company clients or they cannot. I'm sure it will hurt when providers do no longer offer Plesk licenses to all the private users that could add it as an affordable option and it's only for companies now that don't care about how much money they throw out of the window. If they want to become a product only for companies, at least say so directly.

 

[Gary W.]

I'm sure it will hurt when providers do no longer offer Plesk licenses to all the private users that could add it as an affordable option and it's only for companies now that don't care about how much money they throw out of the window. If they want to become a product only for companies, at least say so directly.

I completely agree with you. After all, I’m a private user and have been using Plesk for 7 years. I’ve calculated every single invoice. Over the years, I’ve paid nearly €1000 into Plesk’s pockets. Initially, I purchased directly from Hetzner, which included Plesk in the invoice. The Web Pro license cost only €6.20. It was a fair price.

The current strategy won’t be profitable because they’re losing their most loyal and trusted customers.

 

[T2121]

This opens the market for the development of migration software.

 

[Mike99]

Hello everyone,

I would like to give some more reaction on this price increase topic, maybe interesting for others too. This is reaction is based on some sleepless nights, thinking on this story.

First of all, I really would like highlight, that of course price increases seem to be extreme; on the other hand honestly said, Plesk is the only basis component (except the host itself) that is needed to operate a hosting infrastructure. A Plesk License costs regulary € 34,- a month (WebHost VPS) which of course is money, but on the other hand it is nothing. Let's say that you operate 100 hosting subscriptions on your server, that this would mean for € 3,40 you have everything settled for this customer.

I have also deep dived now into alternative solutions, also open source products. Some of them look promising, others not. At least here in my case I have to say, that the GUI design is something that is important for our customers as well, and also reaction time. This all costs money.

We have now also received the first invoice for ELS, which caused a lot of headache to me. We are charged around € 3,- per month for ELS including TuxCare which is nothing and at least we here see this quite positive. This gives us time, to change our old services from PHP 5.3 to PHP 5.6 (yep, a big topic for us, as 75% of our services still operate unter PHP 5.3; we just did a shutdown of a PHP 5.1 instance).

The one point, that I really do not understand - and this really is a pain in the *** (sorry for the wording) - is the fact, that our Plesk License reseller informed us, that WebPros discontinues the way to buy licenses through partners with immediate effect. Direct licensing through WebPros causes many issues for us:
1. Prices are higher (we had up to 40% discount)
2. CreditCard (or alternatives) are must with Direct Purchase Orders; no way to do post-invoicing including manual bank transfer
3. We have no central license management

Partners are still authorized to sell Licenses, but only in combination with Hosting Infrastructure. In our case, we operate own infrastructure and now cannot do licensing on this platform. One exception for this are Plesk Distributors; but they informed us now (upon our request) that further changes in regards to WebPros products will come up soon.

I have also applied to become Plesk partner directly with immediat response from WebPros account management, that no more partners are accepted. How crazy is this?

For me, it is not about 15 Euros up or down, for me the way of communication is the horror thing. Big changes over the night, making things more complicated than easier.

br
Manuel

P.S.: For sure there are people using Plesk for private servers etc. where money is a topic. But for everyone else, honestly said, and sorry to be really direct (and don't take it negative): If you are not able to afford € 34,- per month, as the only software you need for operating the hosting platform, I would recommend to think about switch to another business case.

From January 2025, subscription is going from 34 to 52 EUR / source: month https://cdn1.plesk.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/09162904/2025_Plesk_Licensing_Guide_CUSTOMER.pdf

This is why everyone is so pissed off, because Plesk is starting to be unpredictable and not very trustworthy on how it communicates the changes, also no points for loyalty. How can I look in the future and say this is the product I want to use, if I am not sure how much it will cost tomorrow?

I think also such an increase is unjustified and hopefully will boost new competition for Plesk and cPanel, I see new products Plesk comes up with and that is nothing users asked for.

 

[Gary W.]

This opens the market for the development of migration software.

Unfortunately, migrations are time-consuming, and things often go wrong. It’s a good thing for companies like Plesk. I remember that even using their internal tool, it took me hours and hours to migrate everything (there’s always something that gets stuck between files, databases, DNS, etc.).

Anyway I'm happy to have switched to CloudPanel. Just today, I installed Flarum in few minutes. I’m living a happier life now. It may sound absurd to get so much joy from leaving Plesk, but that’s how it feels

 

[D3nnis3n]

Well, I'm not having joy with that, but staying is even less joy, as some of the licenses cost more than the cloud servers they are used on now.

 

[dan_r]

I share the same concerns of most of the Pleskians here. I have been using Plesk for around 15 years. Our needs haven't changed much along time: very much appreciated the integration between Apache and Nginx, Migration tools, but many of the new features are redundant for us. We would certainly appreciate a plan for 3 domains (like the one that provides DigitalOcean), because we have VPSs that only use 1 domain... Plesk boasts that it is installed in over 300.000 servers: on such a scale economy and considering that there aren't too many significant improvements, the price increase cannot seem less than greedy. It's the problem of killing the competition: since the same company owns both Plesk and CPanel, they are simply exercising monopolistic practices (prices for CPanel are even worse). For us it is also time to start using an alternative: Plesk is just being abused by these greedy capital vendors.

 

[dan_r]

You are spot on, @Deleted member. It reminds me of the current situation with Intel: poor management and bad business decisions are like the iceberg for the Titanic. It's sad to see the course of Intel, and now of Plesk... We are also starting our migration to a different panel.

 

[D3nnis3n]

Intel at least has a competitor that provides similar performance and actually excerts market pressure that can keep prices lower.
Plesk and cPanel seem to be the same thing basically. There is of course other solutions, but they tend to be more specialized.

 

[Gary W.]

You are spot on, @Deleted member. It reminds me of the current situation with Intel: poor management and bad business decisions are like the iceberg for the Titanic. It's sad to see the course of Intel, and now of Plesk... We are also starting our migration to a different panel.

I'm happy to hear that you're changing panels. One action is worth a thousand words. See you on the other side of the (free) Matrix