Engineering notes from the team building the platform.

"Export the invoices" is at least three different operations with three different shapes. What breaks in the handover, and why you should do it in March rather than January.

Ilinca Bostan

A customer upgrades on day twelve of a thirty-day cycle. What they owe, when, and what the next invoice says differs by platform — and sometimes by which screen you used.

Mario Marin

The payment succeeded, the provisioning failed, and the invoice says paid. It is unavoidable — the question is whether your platform notices, or the customer does first.

Mario Marin

A chargeback is the customer’s bank deciding for you, taking the money, and charging a fee whether you win or not. Most are communication failures, and three small fixes remove them.

Ilinca Bostan

The gap between "this invoice is overdue" and "this server is gone" is a policy, not a feature. Most businesses never write it down, so it exists anyway as whatever the software defaults to.

Mario Marin

Getting money in is built carefully. Getting it back out is built in a hurry, and that is where the accounting goes wrong. Four operations that look like one.

Ilinca Bostan

A gap in an invoice sequence is a question you have to answer, and "the software did it" is not an answer. Where hosting businesses generate gaps and how to stop.

Ilinca Bostan

If you want to own your billing platform rather than rent it, these are the two options — and beyond that they are almost nothing alike. One product versus four, and where each wins.

Mario Marin

Below about thirty clients WHMCS is cheaper — a fact usually left out. Above that the gap runs the other way and widens. What the difference actually buys on each side.

Ilinca Bostan

A thousand customers paying four euros is a different billing problem from forty paying four hundred. Per-client pricing, support load and involuntary churn decide this segment, not feature counts.

Ilinca Bostan

VPS billing looks simple until a customer resizes. Which platforms support your hypervisor, which edition it sits in, and the five flows that actually break.

Mario Marin

Selling physical machines breaks assumptions that shared-hosting billing platforms are built on. Seven questions to ask, what each vendor answers, and the four scenarios to test before you buy.

Mario Marin