Next Up: A Billing Platform We're Building Ourselves

Howdy, friend!

Our new website is live. New plan names, every price on one page, and a Dallas region with three more on the way. If you've clicked around, you've seen it.

What you haven't seen yet is the part you deal with every month: billing. That's what we're building next, from scratch, right here in Austin. Over the coming months we'll be finishing a billing portal of our own, and we want to tell you why, what's wrong with the old way, and what we think the new one can do for you.

Where we've been

Since 2014 we've billed through off-the-shelf software. Today that's ClientExec, which we host ourselves. It has done the basics faithfully for years: invoices go out, cards get charged, and your tickets reach us.

But it was built for a monthly world. Everything runs on a billing cycle. You place an order, someone on our end sets up your server by hand, and you get the same invoice whether that server ran for 30 days or three.

Before deciding to build our own, we took a hard look at the other big names in hosting billing, WHMCS and HostBill among them. They're capable products, and plenty of hosts run on them. What we kept finding was the same shape underneath: a monthly cycle at the core, with hourly billing and instant setup added through extra modules. Switching would have traded one set of workarounds for another.

What's missing

Two gaps matter more than the rest, and they're the reason this project exists.

• Paying for what you use. The servers we run can be billed by the hour. Our billing software can't. So if you need a server for a weekend test, a short project or a busy season, you still pay for the whole month.
• Getting started right away. Every order today ends with a person deploying it by hand. We like being the people behind your servers, but you shouldn't have to wait on us to start one.

A few smaller ones add up too. A monthly invoice tells you what you spent after the fact, not while it's happening. And every new product or option we want to offer means waiting on someone else's roadmap and someone else's add-on.

What we're building

A portal designed around how people actually use servers, with the same Austin team behind it. Here's what it's being built to do:

• Hourly or monthly, your call. Hourly rates are the monthly price divided by 672, and hourly billing stops at 672 hours, so a full month costs the same either way. Spin something up for an afternoon, or leave it running all year.
• A balance you control. Add funds, deploy, and your servers draw from that balance as they run. We're planning low-balance reminders and optional auto top-up, so nothing sneaks up on you.
• Deploy in a few clicks. Pick a plan and a region, and the portal builds the server for you. No waiting on us, though we're still a message away.
• Spending you can see. Usage shown as it happens, not a month later, with sales tax on its own line of every receipt.
• Room to grow. We're building it so new products, regions and payment options can be added without waiting on anyone else.

We've been at this since 2014, and this is the piece that lets us offer the flexibility of the big clouds without giving up what makes us different: a real person who knows your setup and actually replies.

What happens next

There won't be a big switch day. The plan is to open the new portal to new sign-ups first, then invite existing server customers over in stages, and we plan to give plenty of notice before anything changes for you. If you're on one of our shared hosting plans, nothing changes for now: you'll keep using the portal you use today.

Until then, everything works the way it does now. Your services, your invoices and your support tickets stay right where they are.

We'll share timing when we're confident in it, not before. In the meantime, we'd love to hear what your billing has always been missing. Tell us, and it may end up in the portal.