WHMCS is not a bad piece of software, and it's worth saying that plainly before making the case against defaulting to it. It became the industry standard because it was one of the first billing platforms purpose-built for hosting, and for a long time it had no serious competition. That history is exactly why it's overrated today: hosts default to it out of habit and market inertia, not because anyone has recently checked whether it's still the simplest, leanest option for a modern hosting business.
Simplicity in a webhosting billing system isn't about having the most settings screens — it's about how much you have to configure, license and maintain to get invoicing, provisioning and payments working as one coherent system. WHMCS's answer to most feature gaps is "there's a module for that," which means the platform that's supposed to simplify your operations instead grows a dependency tree of third-party plugins, each with its own update cycle, licensing cost, and potential for breaking the others.
Simplifying webhosting automation, as I build it, means fewer moving parts, not more settings: one platform, automation and African payment rails built in rather than bolted on, and a provisioning integration that doesn't need a module to talk to your control panel. For hosts who've found themselves managing a WHMCS installation that's become more complex than the business it's supposed to run, that's the actual simplification — not another dashboard, fewer systems to keep in sync.