WHMCS meters your licence by active client count — $34.95/mo up to 250 clients, $399.95 at 10,000. Salieno Core is one flat monthly price at every one of those numbers, installed on your own server. The full table is below, with the date we read it and a link to the page we read it from.
Skip to the price tableOne flat monthly price — unlimited active clients, unlimited staff
Self-hosted — your server, your database, your domain
30-day free trial — your card isn’t charged until day 30.
Price, at matched client counts
WHMCS publishes six self-hosted tiers, priced by how many active clients your install holds. Salieno publishes one price. Both columns are per month, before tax; the last column is what the gap costs over twelve months.
| Active clients | WHMCS self-hosted | Salieno Core | Difference over a year |
|---|---|---|---|
Up to 250 Plus | $34.95 | $6 | $347.40 |
251 – 500 Professional | $54.95 | $6 | $587.40 |
501 – 1,000 Business 1,000 | $84.95 | $6 | $947.40 |
1,001 – 2,500 Business 2,500 | $179.95 | $6 | $2,087.40 |
2,501 – 5,000 Business 5,000 | $284.95 | $6 | $3,347.40 |
5,001 – 10,000 Business 10,000 | $399.95 | $6 | $4,727.40 |
Above 10,000 No tier published | Not published | $6 | — |
WHMCS does not publish a price above 10,000 active clients anywhere on whmcs.com. Comparison pages that quote one are quoting something we could not find on the vendor’s own site, so we don’t print it either.
WHMCS also sells fully managed plans from $9.99/mo for up to 25 active clients, then $0.40 per additional client up to 50. Those run on WebPros Cloud rather than your server — the pricing page splits them under “Self Hosted” and “Fully Managed”, and the cards read “Host on your own server” against “Hosted on WebPros Cloud”. Salieno Core is self-hosted, so the like-for-like comparison is the self-hosted column above. We name the $9.99 plan rather than leave it out.
Every price on the WHMCS pricing page is captioned “Per month, excl. tax.” The Business tiers list “Access to priority support*”, and the same page footnotes it: “Priority Support is available during core business hours for an additional per-ticket fee.”
WHMCS prices read from whmcs.com/pricing on 27 July 2026. Salieno’s price is read from our own catalogue and is the price you pay at checkout. If WHMCS has repriced since, their page is the authority, not ours.
Why people go looking
These are the reasons that come up, in the order they come up. We didn’t invent them, and the last one is the one we can’t answer.
The bill goes up because you did well
Every extra active client moves you toward the next tier. The software that bills your customers bills you more for having them.
The floor is high whether or not you’re big
The cheapest WHMCS self-hosted licence is $34.95/mo and it covers up to 250 active clients. With twenty clients you still pay the 250-client price — about $1.75 per client per month, before you’ve sold anything.
The price has moved before
From WHMCS’s own July 2021 mailing to licence holders: “The Plus license remains the same as today with a client limit of 250 and a monthly cost of $18.95.” Today the Plus licence still stops at 250 active clients and costs $34.95. Same tier, same limit, 84% more.
It isn’t one invoice, it’s the invoice
Billing software tends to sit on a bill that also carries your control panel. It’s the one line you can change without touching the panel your servers actually run.
Nobody explains the meter
What counts as an active client is one sentence long and it decides your bill. It’s the next section.
2021 quote from WHMCS’s own customer mailing, whmcs.com/members/mailings/?k=price21-emaild, read 27 July 2026. Current price from whmcs.com/pricing, same day.
The meter
WHMCS answers this on its own pricing page: “An Active Client is defined as any client with at least one active product, service, addon or domain.” That is the whole definition, and it is the number your licence price is set by.
A $2 domain counts the same as a dedicated server
One active domain registration makes a client active. The meter doesn’t look at what you charge them, only that something is running.
Going over upgrades you automatically
From the same pricing FAQ: “We’ll notify you when that happens and unless you opt-out, we’ll upgrade you automatically for uninterrupted operation.” The upgrade is opt-out, not opt-in.
So people prune their own customer list
Deleting dormant clients to stay under a tier is a rational response to that meter, and it means your billing platform is quietly damaging the customer record it exists to hold.
Salieno counts nothing
There is no client meter in Salieno Core. No number to manage, no records to prune, and no upgrade email. The licence costs the same at ten clients and at ten thousand.
Both quotations read from whmcs.com/pricing on 27 July 2026.
Beyond price
Price is why people arrive on this page. It isn’t the only thing that changes, and two of these rows go against us.
| Salieno Core | WHMCS | |
|---|---|---|
| Active-client limit | None — the licence doesn’t count clients | Six self-hosted tiers, 250 to 10,000 clients |
| What the price does as you grow | Nothing | Moves up a tier; the upgrade is applied automatically unless you opt out |
| Licence term | Monthly, cancel anytime | Monthly — every plan on the pricing page is priced “Per month, excl. tax.” |
| Where it runs | Your own server | Your own server, or WebPros Cloud on the managed plans |
| Support included in the licence | Ticketing and live chat, answered within a business day | Email and ticket support on every tier; live chat on Business tiers; priority support is a per-ticket fee |
| Provisioning in the box | cPanel/WHM; Namecheap for domains; Stripe and PayPal for payment | A far larger first-party and third-party module library |
| Everything else | Marketplace add-ons, bought once, yours to keep | Included modules plus a long-established third-party ecosystem |
| Migration tooling | None — see the switching section | First-party migration service offered on the pricing page |
Switching
Salieno installs alongside WHMCS, not over it. Your existing platform keeps billing and provisioning the whole time, you cut over one piece at a time, and at every point in the sequence below you can stop and change nothing. There is no import weekend and no moment where both systems are half-live.
Install alongside, not instead
Salieno Core installs on your own server (PHP 8.2+, IonCube). Put it on a subdomain and leave WHMCS running. Nothing has been cut over.
Rebuild configuration first
Products, pricing, tax rules, gateway credentials. This is configuration, not data, and it is the longest part. It is also the part you can do at your own pace with nothing depending on it.
Move clients before you move money
Bring client records and services across, then run a handful end to end: order, invoice, provision, suspend. Find the problems on test data.
Cut new signups over first
Point the order form at Salieno and let new business land there while existing services keep renewing in WHMCS. If something is wrong you have found it on one customer, not on all of them.
Retire WHMCS when its last service renews
Not on a date chosen in advance. When nothing is billing through it, cancel the licence.
Four things to sort out before you cut over
Recurring payment mandates
Card tokens and PayPal subscriptions live at your gateway, tied to the platform that created them, and no migration moves them. Sort re-authorisation first rather than last: it is the only item here that can stop money arriving.
Invoice and client numbering
Set your next invoice number deliberately before the first live invoice. Numbering cannot be changed retrospectively and your accountant will care.
Ticket history
Support threads are the thing migrations drop. Keep the old install readable for a while, or export and archive them somewhere your staff can still search.
Anything that needs a module we don't have
cPanel/WHM, Namecheap, Stripe and PayPal are in the box; more panels, gateways and registrars are one-time purchases in the marketplace. If you invoice into a market with a mandated e-invoicing format, ask us first. We would rather answer that before you buy than after.
Plan for a few weeks of parallel running rather than an evening — and take them at your own pace, because nothing is at risk until the last step.
Questions
Get started
Salieno Core installs on your own server and runs beside whatever you have now. Start the 30-day trial, or click through the admin in the live demo first — no account, no form.
Compare all four platformsWHMCS is a trademark of its owner. Salieno is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by WHMCS. Every WHMCS figure on this page was read from whmcs.com/pricing on 27 July 2026, except the 2021 price, which comes from WHMCS’s own customer mailing linked above. Prices change without notice; the vendor’s page is the authority.