Sidenote; apparently WHMCS trusts their extreme price increase to counter the amount of customers which are moving away from WHMCS.
I think WHMCS is not acting smart, because;
a lot of WHMCS users will leave; I said before 1/3, but maybe it will be more e.g. 2/5 (eventually more)
WHMCS receives a massive amount of negative feedback/reviews which WILL hurt new potential customers
they should listen to their customers for once, instead of doing their own thing (as they have done for many years)
In my humble opinion (and I have said it before); the hosting market is becoming more and more difficult to thrive in. It has been a pain for the past 3 or 4 years and is becoming more and more difficult as a "small/medium" hosting company compared to the bigger ones. So software like WHMCS (and also cPanel, Plesk, etc.) rely on these "smaller" hosting companies. But instead of supporting and helping them, they simply increase prices. We have seen it with Plesk (twice now), we have seen it with cPanel and we are now seeing it with WHMCS.
And if you think this is the last price hike, then you are dead wrong. These price increases will follow each other up more often and thus faster. WHMCS (or the company above) simply does not care about their customers anymore. You can see that with those owned licenses and also with these, simply put, crazy price increases. You will not only lose your current customers, but also scare away new customers. If they aren't scared away from these prices, then they sure will be scared away by the massive amount of negative reviews on Trustpilot and elsewhere. People actually do read reviews.
WHMCS says they listen. Yeah right. Not in my experience. They simply do as they please (or are forced to do from the company above them). Now they added two hops, like that will make a big difference for the "smaller" companies. It's already dificult enough to keep your head above water nowadays in these difficult (Covid-19) times. But what happens? Plesk increased their pricing again (early this year) and now WHMCS will increase their pricing as well (extremely). So we, as a hosting company, have to pay more and more and if we charge that to our customers they state; wow, you are charging absurd prices! I will cancel my contract and move elsewhere (= 9 out of the 10 times to a very big hosting company; which use their own in-house developed software).
In the end, give or take a few years, smaller (hosting) companies will not exist anymore and only the big one remains. Which result in price hikes set by them, where software like WHMCS, Plesk, cPanel, etc. will hardly exist anymore, as these bigger companies use their own, developed in-house, software solutions. So in the end; we will all lose from this...