Question Massive price increase for reseller licenses?

[B_P]

By the way I just compared our company's invoice between October and November. Some people talk about a price increase of 300%...
...however I see (in black and white) that the highest increase (for us at least) is 875% (no joke). This is really unacceptable.

I will gladly make a copy of both invoices and put them online for everyone to see. I doubt Plesk wants this. But I got proof for this that Plesk is telling nonsense with their previous statements. We have been a partner for over more than a decade. And this is the treatment you receive for being a loyal partner.

Anyways, because of this (this is not a normal way for company to increase their prices, it's absurd) we are already looking into several alternatives (as mentioned in my previous post).

If someone wants proof I will scan the official invoices and gladly share them here / online. So you can see for yourself that the biggest price change, for us, is an amazing 875%. Unlike Plesk, we cannot force our customers to pay an increase of 875%, let alone that it's not rational, but Plesk doesn't seem to be interested in being rational at all.

Well, that would be a proof worth publishing!

 

[emil_c]

Just wait until an open source alternative appears. Wouldn't that be nice?

 

[robetus]

I just want to also state my great disappointment in this. Doubling the price was a very poor business move, and the fact that now cPanel when purchased from most resellers is cheaper than Plesk 30 domain edition I think many people will move away from Plesk to either cPanel or open source panels. Plesk support is also terrible compared to cPanel. Really in my experience there is no real Plesk support. I hope now if they can keep their customers they will at least offer much better support.

 

[JackH]

Hi B_P,
to show our commitment and support to our customers who have been supporting Plesk since the beginning, renewals will happen at the old price for all customers who have purchased a Plesk license from the Plesk online store. The new pricing will make everyone more competitive in the market with no unfair advantages. Single license customers have the very same ( possible ) benefits as partners/resellers, when they purchase licenses over the Plesk online store.

I have had an email this morning that suggests this is NOT the case. Can you confirm our existing prices will be honoured?

 

[Danny325]

Well its true this price increase is really unacceptable.

We were lucky and paid 1 year ahead, so we are still on the old price. But at the end of contract we have to pay more for plesk then for the server.

Thats really not ok. Its an increase over 30% in total cost for us. We cant waste as much !
Its not even a genius move. Im pretty sure you gonna loose many of your costumers and your panel gonna die. And a dead panel wont be as profitable then a popular panel with many costumers even if theypay less.

 

[Sergio Manzi]

I have had an email this morning that suggests this is NOT the case. Can you confirm our existing prices will be honoured?

Same here: bought on-line, paying monthly via Cleverbridge:

Dear Valued Customer,

Starting March 2018, Plesk will be adjusting the price of the product(s) you are currently subscribed to:

Name of product: Plesk 12.5 - Web Pro Edition
New price: EUR 12
Effective date: April, 15th 2018

These price adjustments are a result of the new features which have been introduced to the product, and/or the discontinuation of old license plans. More information on the price adjustments can be found on Plesk's website.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding Plesk products, features or license plans, please contact Plesk here. For billing related enquiries, please reply to this email, or contact cleverbridge here.

We appreciate your continuous support, and we hope to keep on providing you with excellent products and customer service.

Thank you,

cleverbridge Team

Old price for my WebPro license was EUR 9. That's a 33% increase. Unacceptable. Looking for FOSS alternatives.

 

[Sergio Manzi]

I must add that I was mislead by that @UFHH01 statement: I was sure my subscription would had stayed at the same level as before. Had I knew about this increase I would had taken action much earlier!

 

[Alejandro Oro Vojacek]

They increased my price. I upgraded to the last version so I could take advantage of nginx caching. Now my server is broken as the nginx configuration says no_cache error. Plesk doesn't know what happens and they are investigating.

Last month I lost a customer because he wanted to do a full backup and was greeted with an error, it was a bug in Plesk but customer decided to just migrate to another service. Now half my customers are down because I just decided to upgrade from Plesk 17.5 to Plesk 17.8. They implemented a new featured that effectively breaks old installations. This is great. I lose customers, the product keeps breaking and I have to spend more on the license.

If anyone knows an alternative, be me guest and post it.

 

[Laughing Steam]

This isn't serious, is it?

I just got notified my package is moving to the new pricing, even though a few months ago I talked with support who said they are renewing at the same price, along with posts here confirming the same:

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Imgur

If this is actually getting increased for us, it's absolutely ridiculous. I understand price increases, but more than double?!?! You kidding me? I don't know who approved that but it'll turn out bad in the end for them. I can't afford to keep my licenses. I don't live in the US, I live in Canada, so with 3 licenses, it's going from 150USD per year to 330 USD, or $193 to $425 CAD per year. What the actual heck. This is terrible and a very poor decision.

On a positive note, if Plesk's plan is to have fewer customers, it's working!

 

[Danny325]

The funniest thing they talked about "keeping good support". No single answer in this forum on my problem.
Now i had to buy a "server support assistence" 10€ at month to be able to open a ticket, after already paying a monthly fee (first ever support where i have to pay to open a ticket).

The first person wich answered my ticket just linked me useless links and so on took me 2-3 weeks and more then 10 answers to tell me that a part of my problem is currently a bug in Plesk, and they gonna "fix it as soon as possible". The problem is already issued 5 months ago or even longer.
And all your mails can probably end up in spam because of this bug. I won't even know wich impact this bug can have on big companys (big online shops).

Edit: It's almost impossible to run an own mail server over plesk if you don't configure everything at yourself.

 

[IgorG]

The first person wich answered my ticket

Could you tell me ticket ID?

 

[Danny325]

Could you tell me ticket ID?

I can tell you my forum Thread wich is still unsolved and unanswered.

The exactly bug i mentioned is that sending from mail() dkim isnt applied. Eather i still have other problems that my mails don't go trough spamfilter for example the strange smtp.helo=[192.168.1.31] and wrong sasl_username wich get applied in my headers.

 

[IgorG]

I can tell you my forum Thread wich is still unsolved and unanswered.

Ok, but I would like to check support ticket, mentioned by you.

 

[nrep]

Have plesk licenses gone up again?! I just got an e-mail telling me my Web Admin edition license has been "updated" - on closer look this means it has doubled in price and I wasn't notified about this.

 

[Laughing Steam]

Whelp I'm coming up on my license renewal and wanted to see if anyone else has migrated yet? I simply can't afford this anymore. It was only for my own websites, not reselling or anything.

Looks for opensource or cheaper options if any has any luck with alternatives!

 

[Laughing Steam]

Believe me, we are not the first and not the only ones on the market who raise the price. Our business analysts and financiers very meticulously calculated all the risks and possible problems. I can assure you that the analysis of sales for the time elapsed since the price increase demonstrates that all our calculations were accurate.

I hope it's wrong now. Shame if people actually continued to do business on this basis. A price increase is not the issue here. The issue is two things:

1. Doubling of the price at least. That's unreasonable. I don't care if it's been 18 years since the last major increase - that's not an excuse to all of sudden double it.
2. Communication. It was abrupt and I was told it wasn't going to increase for the loyal customers already on it, but new. That was a lie.

 

[trialotto]

@Laughing Steam

The prices have been increased in (a not so recent) past - as can be figured out by the age and content of this topic thread, which essentially notifies and warns Plesk users.

In essence, it could have been known to you.

In addition, Plesk (formerly Parallels) offered a perpetual license allowing you to renew at (relatively) low renewal rate - and that renewal scheme still exists now.

In short, when having bought the perpetual license in the past, the current price increase would not have been that painful.

Nevertheless, I do agree to some extent that prices have gone up in a way that is not entirely proper : it harms the Plesk community as a whole and it will sooner or later harm Plesk as a company, since the extra revenue of increased prices will not balance with a (future) decrease in revenue due to "lost customers".

But it is not our job to evaluate Plesk as a company or it's policies (!).

It should be our focus to (still) see the merits of Plesk as a hosting panel : in essence, you can go with cheaper alternatives - this choice will not benefit you in the long run.

In my humble opinion, the discussion should not be about prices : we all have the freedom of choice to stop using Plesk (!).

And if we decide to continue with Plesk : we should be fair and not discuss the pricing, since it is actually "part of the deal" and the result of our (own) choice.

Again, I personally want to emphasize the value of Plesk as a hosting panel - as opposed to the discussion about Plesk licensing costs.

A small tip : just do not buy the licenses from the Plesk store - there are cheaper (discounted) alternatives around.

Regards.........

 

[IgorG]

They are increasing pricing *again*

The new pricing is to come into effect once with the publication date in the online store, on January 1st, 2021.
We have prepared a special FAQ with answers to possible questions on this topic.
There you can also ask a question if you have not found an answer to it.
Thanks.

 

[B_P]

They are increasing pricing *again*

Honestly? I guess we slowly should think about moving to another platform... Maybe ispconfig is a good candidate... And given the amount of support / debugging / bug-fixing we do, it might be good to invest this time into an open source platform...

 

[sebgonzes]

The new pricing is to come into effect once with the publication date in the online store, on January 1st, 2021.
We have prepared a special FAQ with answers to possible questions on this topic.
There you can also ask a question if you have not found an answer to it.
Thanks.

Not a good news... In FAQ plesk say that no increase in last 3 years... but the increase of 3 years was 100%!
Just hope that plesk try to put an real and include support for client (and not just an forum with form for sometime big bugs) with the new price.