Question Massive price increase for reseller licenses?

[LTUser]

Hmmm.... Jan.2022 again. For what more in terms of performance?

 

[LTUser]

In the 15 years since we've been using Plesk, it hasn't improved enough to justify these prices.
The useful add-ons (better fire walling / anti-spam / disaster recovery backup / speed/seo optimization) all cause huge additional costs compared to the basic price of Plesk. And we don't need any support.

 

[B_P]

This seems to be a never ending story of profiteering.
Here's my story of personal Plesk price increases (including VAT):
until 2017: Plesk WebPro license - 4,99 € / month
until 2020: Plesk WebPro license for 5,45 € / month
2020-2022 (2-year license): 7,58 € / month
from 2022 onwards, my license reseller discontinues yearly and bi-yearly prices and wants to charge 17,85 €/month

Thus, within 5 years, there was a price increase of 257%.

At the same time:
- The software quality has not improved remarkably
- The support has not improved remarkably.

However, at the same time, Webpros HoldCo B.V. (the company which bought Plesk), had a an adjusted EBITDA of supposingly 72 M$ (!!!) in 2019. So the argument that the additional license fees are needed to improve the software is a farce!

This behavior is clearly not understandable, neither tolerable.

@IgorG It would be interesting to hear a Plesk / Webpros official statement on this greedy changes.

 

[HHawk]

Plesk does not care... And before you know it, they will increase prices again. For? Better "performance" and many, many more "useful" features. And do not those "awesome" UI changes. Plesk is going downhill fast and in many, many ways. Just like WHMCS, cPanel, SolusVM and what else the investing company has in their claws....

 

[sebgonzes]

35% of increase price in 2022.... THANKS A LOT PLESK TEAM!

 

[Hex]

My cat food price has increased 70%, no features or improvements in the content whatsoever.

 

[sebgonzes]

Sure that you have no choice of what your cat had to eat and not easy to change his food (almost as dificult as change panel control and system of more than 100 servers) .... also sure that price of this food have increase about 250% the last 5 years.

 

[LTUser]

My cat food price has increased 70%, no features or improvements in the content whatsoever.

Comparing cats and servers is irrelevant. I hope that doesn't catch on with the professionals.

You use free software as main components and therefore build a core that configures these main components. There is nothing more expensive about it if you do it right. Your problem is that you are bringing investors on board who are becoming increasingly greedy without really offering added value to the customers who are supposed to finance them. (...)

 

[Laughing Steam]

lol from Plesk's pricing FAQ:

"At Plesk, as in other software companies, we periodically assess the impact of our pricing to ensure there is a reasonable alignment with the needs of our customers and partners across the globe and our own cost of doing business. Therefore, we may make further price adjustments to be able to deliver our customers with outstanding value and an exceptional product within a reasonable price."



"periodically" = once a year
"within a reasonable price" - can't make this up

 

[robetus]

Directadmin is still not being super greedy and there's always ispconifg if you want to learn it to free yourself of constant price hikes. Don't see any end in sight for the prices to keep rising with these kind of products.

 

[B_P]

What is remarkable that Plesk does not respond to messages / complaints about license fee issues. Even though the message was read by multiple employees (reead receipt), even after 3 months, nobody replied.

 

[HHawk]

What is remarkable that Plesk does not respond to messages / complaints about license fee issues. Even though the message was read by multiple employees (reead receipt), even after 3 months, nobody replied.

They really do not care. As long as the official owner (Oakley Capital: investment company) is happy with the profits, nothing is going to change.

Sidenotel; I am a bit worried for our servers though, because of the situation in the East. I sincerely hope that Plesk has screened all of it's personel. The world is werid at the moment. So I have no clue how safe these servers are with Plesk having full access to them in general...

 

[IgorG]

What is remarkable that Plesk does not respond to messages / complaints about license fee issues. Even though the message was read by multiple employees (reead receipt), even after 3 months, nobody replied.

Please tell me where you sent these requests and from whom? I'll try to escalate.

 

[IgorG]

What is remarkable that Plesk does not respond to messages / complaints about license fee issues. Even though the message was read by multiple employees (reead receipt), even after 3 months, nobody replied.

Replied in PM.

 

[HHawk]

As I have mentioned before; I am unhappy with the price increases (which happens now yearly apparently), however the price increases (yearly) are for increasing the quality, support and features for Plesk. I will quote a few lines from their price increase FAQ from 2021 (here) and 2022 (here).

Quote 1a
We are adjusting our prices to ensure that we can continue to invest heavily in product development and grow our partner ecosystem. What is more, we are planning further new solutions to support our journey in becoming the leader in server, web infrastructure, and WordPress automation solutions. Please note that we did not increase our prices for the last three years. (FAQ 2020-2021)

Quote 1b
We are adjusting our prices to ensure that we can continue to invest heavily in product development and grow our partner ecosystem. Furthermore, we are planning to launch even more new solutions to support our journey in becoming the leader in server, web infrastructure, and WordPress automation solutions. (FAQ 2021-2022)

Quote 2
How significant is the price adjustment? The exact increase depends on the specific product. For most cases, the overall increase is below 10%. (FAQ 2020-2021) Sidenote: it was not 10% for us, but way, way more.

Quote 3
We strive to deliver the best tools available on the market to our customers. Over the last 12 months, we’ve continued to listen and to deliver many critical features and capabilities, and over the upcoming 12 months we have many more exciting releases in the pipeline. Stay up to date with new releases on our change log and find the latest news on our blog. (FAQ 2021-2022)

So, if I understand things correctly; both increases are used to improve things in Plesk and support around it, right? So we are paying more, but we also get more as they, and I quote, "Over the last 12 months, we’ve continued to listen and to deliver many critical features and capabilities." If this were all true, then explain the following to me;

1. Why aren't top-voted features not included e.g. Varnish Cache (yes, I know/use the Docker method)? And there are several other (highly upvoted) features demanded by the most loyal / experienced Plesk users.
2. Why is the Plesk Application Installer "pathetic" things do not install or are heavily outdated (Magento 2.10 has been 3 years EOL)? Shouldn't this be a modern (and updated) tool to install all kinds of applications easily? Seems utterly useless now to be honest.
3. Why has support become way, way slower than before? Support tickets remain unanswered for almost 3 hours (and counting). This was never the case before, as support would always be fast.
4. Why waste precious time, money and energy on the Plesk user interface (UI)? It was fine as it was! Why not spend more time on the real issues at hand and/or requested features? You can change the interface as much as you like, but the end product is still the same (with it's flaws).
5. Every time a new feature is included (e.g. tech domain, trash can, etc.) it's enabled by default. Why? We setup multiple servers up each week and then suddenly whe notice something new was added and have to change our automated install script. This costs us a lot of time. Make (side-)features by default turned of and inform the users that they can enable it. Not the other away around...

These are just 5 concerns which come to mind for the time being. Which clearly does not justify the price increase(s) "every" year... Probably they will create a "Price Adjustment 2023" by the end of this year. As of today (17th of March 2022) it doesn't exist yet (check here). But I guess it will appear also or the year after probably because of all the angry comments and responses so far...

Oh and Igor, do not remove this post as I am not bashing Plesk or attacking it's employees, I am just stating facts here and my personal opinion about the way things are going by Plesk. And there is also no need to change the text under my profile again to "Plesk Hater" like before. Let's keep things professional and on-topic. But I am taking a screenshot neverthess.

 

[B_P]

Please tell me where you sent these requests and from whom? I'll try to escalate.

After having resent the message, I got a response, but besides "sorry we can't do anything about it and we forwarded your complaint to the management" nothing valuable came out of it.

 

[tkalfaoglu]

Just my two cents.. I would NOT want Cloudflare or any other company to "manage" my DNS records. Heck I would not want Cloudflare to manage my anything. I, and many other users have suffered their random bannings and problems for a long time now.

 

[jubilo]

Plesk lacks ESSENTIAL functions such as being able to use multiple storage disks (in Plesk you can't, 1 disk must store all the sites or else work with LVM which makes it impractical in production servers) but Cpanel allows this a long time ago, you can store several sites on a disk and if it fills up add another disk and continue storing sites.

Something as simple as changing the user name from admin to any other etc etc.

Since I use Plesk I have fallen in love with the system but I do not see it viable to invest in it in the long term, since the essential improvements even if they are in vote may take years or never be implemented.

 

[Monty]

@jubilo I don't really see how LVM is impractical for production use. We run all our servers with LVM (who doesn't?) and whenever we're running out of disk space then we'll simply add another disk and use pvcreate + vgextend + lvresize + resize2fs to increase the disk space

 

[jubilo]

@jubilo I don't really see how LVM is impractical for production use. We run all our servers with LVM (who doesn't?) and whenever we're running out of disk space then we'll simply add another disk and use pvcreate + vgextend + lvresize + resize2fs to increase the disk space

In my opinion because of the following:

1 - Complexity of administration
2 - Harder to recover data if a disk fail
3 - Efficiency drop
4 - Downtime (or minimum but is there)

If you are not convinced by my answer, let's imagine this impossible scenario in plesk:

/home1 SSD disk
/home2 HDD disk
/home3 NVMe disk

All this on the same server, although Cpanel would not automatically place the service on the desired disk, it is possible.
On the other hand, it is impossible in Plesk.