I am trying to switch to ASTPP from a2billing and Magnus Billing and have been tinkering around with this for about a month now. While ASTPP has tremendous potential, I find the Community Edition to be purposely underpowered and lacking in mandatory features. I understand the need to push the Enterprise Edition but if the Community Edition does not have the minimum required features to start the business then people will move on after they try it instead of choosing ASTPP and potentially upgrading at a later point. That’s just my 10 cents.
Hi @dcitelecom
Thanks for sharing your concern for the community edition. We would like to add the missing feature to give kick start users with community edition.
You can report the missing features list in Jira and we will look at that.
They did have a now deleted post up where they said they were working on a version 7 and wanted suggestions. I put some suggestions in, but I only know of one they said they would accepted. However, if they put them in the community version, I don’t know.
The problem with the community version is it needs to be badly updated.
I wish they sold modules like they used to do. Maybe even put in a Module/Add-On market were others can submit and sell on the market so they can take a share of sales.
I tried that Magnus Billing, but dropped it fast. That Magnus is a real jerk and would not lift a finger to help anyone get started, or even help with issues.
I gotta give the iNextrix folks a lot of credit as they are a bit helpful.
There was also another (now abandoned) open source billing system I found, but they were worse than Magnus. They would insult you for asking about the very limited wiki they had with hardly anything to guide you on even installing it. A lot of the wiki was outdated and you would get errors during install. After insulting you, they would demand money.
I am new to ASTPP and there are certainly challenges to make to work similar to our old system but so far it looks good. Unfortunately, forum participation could be better (Many thanks to the 4 people who are always replying to my posts 
) I also think a different monetization structure could be successful as there are people who don’t mind paying a monthly fee for a managed system and there are others who prefer to self-administer their system but would purchase individual modules for a reasonable one-time fee.
We are planning about it.
You should also add a DONATE button to the website. While some of us may never buy the Enterprise version, we would probably donate money once in a while towards the project in recognition of the hard work required to keep it going.
No button, but a page
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They do have a one year license, but I think they should do the following to help people get started with the Enterprise version.
From cheapest to most expensive.
- Monthly Self hosted with no support
- Monthly Self hosted with support
- Monthly hosted with no support
- Monthly hosted with support
- Yearly self-hosted with no support
- Yearly self-hosted with support (This is one they offer now)
- Yearly hosted with no support
- Yearly hosted with support (Also offered now)
I think many are not too keen to dump a one year fee into it and not be happy with it.
I think this in addition to selling licensed modules to the community version, and a module marketplace would bring them in a lot more revenue.
OneBill has integration with the open source Kazoo which after looking at is really fabulous, but at $350 a month USD, can’t do that. Maybe is I was raking in 100k a month, then it would be worth it.
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