

Ask HN: Pricing for small business app? - MattGrommes

My wife developed an application that her original customer uses to run his business. There's now another potential customer who wants to buy the package to run his very similar business. The problem is that we don't know how to approach pricing since the original was built as a custom consulting job. The software runs on a server and on laptops connecting back to the server. We're trying to decide if the best model is a one-time fee, a monthly cost per-laptop, etc. Is a one-time fee plus monthly maintenance a "normal" way of selling small business software? There hasn't been a ton of required support for the original customer but there's always new features wanted, bugs that pop up, etc. so we don't want to end up getting money up front and just losing money supporting the thing. Any ideas or past experience would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.<p>There's no problems with the original customer of the software in regards to selling it, in case that's a concern.
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eschutte2
I'd do it as a one-time license fee based on the number of client laptops,
plus an optional annual maintenance fee (fixing bugs and keeping it running,
no new features), plus the option to pay for new feature development on an
hourly basis (subject to your availability).

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caw
I agree with this. There's nothing wrong with this model and it's quite
reasonable as far as expectations.

The only time I would do monthly fee per laptop is if you owned the laptops
and they were leasing the hardware from you or if you owned the server. But
now you're a server admin, and all the fun joys that come with that (SLAs,
upgrades, patching...)

