Help Wanted Pricing software as a service

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Trump's Staff
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So I'm developing a SAS that is basically a document manager/searcher/indexer, where my users can login and see the documents of the company.

I'm developing it on an Azure platform, and taking advantage of the PDF indexing, Blob storage, SQL, etc.

I have computed the basic storage amounts to be around $150-$200, and this includes virtually all the usage they need.

So how much should I price this on a monthly basis? Is anyone familiar with this type of software and its prices? Should I charge per user instead?

I am expecting several companies to sign up to this, so each site will be the same with very little modifications, so code wise there is nothing too different to do once deployed.


Or as a businessman, how can you price this, do you price it at $500.00 flat profit a month on top of the storage fees? is 1k month way too much for a document storage websites?
 
Big_w_powah

Big_w_powah

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$200 is the top of your cost...Find your desire margin. I would say 3:1, and price at $600 personally if I were selling this.
 
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Khane

Khane

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You seem to be ignoring one major thing in your pricing scheme. Customer Support.
 
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Gunnar Durden
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I assume your target demo is very small companies, anything medium or up is going to have a on site solution.

With that, I would say focus on a per user model, those are usually more acceptable to a small company. for some reason $14.99 a user for 10 users is more palatable than 150 a month. (Obviously shift price to meet your margins)

Im still curious to know more about this and how this works. Whats the customer UI?
 
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Trump's Staff
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There are no onsite solutions for this for the vast majority of potential users. The first person to get in will take that business for at least 1-2 years.

The UI is simple, grid with the existing documents, search module (crawls the PDF and word docs), and an upload module. The user base per companies ranges from 150 possible users to up to 1k users per company, and some users will never use it at all, not even login.

Costumer service is me, to help troubleshoot stuff. All the website does is upload a document/ search for document/ download a document.

Company means for example doctors maintaining patient records, users are the patients. Some will patient will never log in at all. Once the site is created, there is no ongoing work needed, and customer support while there is some is very simple. but i guess i will need have someone on staff with that.
 
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Khane

Khane

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What you're talking about sounds a whole lot like a CRM system, of which there are hundreds.

I think you're doing a bad job of explaining what sets this software apart.
 
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Xarpolis

Xarpolis

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Take Quickbooks for example on their pricing structure. You pay a flat rate for 1 user (some companies do fine with a single user). Others pay a higher amount for 5 users. The next jump is 20 users. You discount each user for multiples, but people are willing to pay. The company I was at had 7 employees that used quickbooks all day long, but only 5 user access. It wasn't worth it for them to jump to 20. What sucked is we had to constantly log people out to check out our customers if someone else was just sitting in quickbooks while doing nothing.
 
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Trump's Staff
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Khane said:
What you're talking about sounds a whole lot like a CRM system, of which there are hundreds.

I think you're doing a bad job of explaining what sets this software apart.
Click to expand...

Imagine that every business office in the country with revenues over $150,000 , is by law, suddenly required to go full electronic, and provide any requested documents to anyone walking into the business location. Most will not want to spend a million dollars on it, most will want to spend as little as possible in order to comply with the law. This is that situation. I have to clone myself and walk into every office and make a sales pitch.
 
kegkilla

kegkilla

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Lendarios said:
Imagine that every business office in the country with revenues over $150,000 , is by law, suddenly required to go full electronic, and provide any requested documents to anyone walking into the business location. Most will not want to spend a million dollars on it, most will want to spend as little as possible in order to comply with the law. This is that situation. I have to clone myself and walk into every office and make a sales pitch.
Click to expand...
so sounds like you're looking to provide a low cost alternative to businesses that don't require the enterprise level solutions from the big boys? if so, I think your starting place should be researching the pricing of all the big players in the market and all the smaller guys as well, and going from there. since you don't any brand value going into this, you're going to need to price it at a significant discount as compared to whatever else is out there, but that shouldn't be a problem for a one man shop.
 
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Vinen

Vinen

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Lendarios said:
There are no onsite solutions for this for the vast majority of potential users. The first person to get in will take that business for at least 1-2 years.

The UI is simple, grid with the existing documents, search module (crawls the PDF and word docs), and an upload module. The user base per companies ranges from 150 possible users to up to 1k users per company, and some users will never use it at all, not even login.

Costumer service is me, to help troubleshoot stuff. All the website does is upload a document/ search for document/ download a document.

Company means for example doctors maintaining patient records, users are the patients. Some will patient will never log in at all. Once the site is created, there is no ongoing work needed, and customer support while there is some is very simple. but i guess i will need have someone on staff with that.
Click to expand...

Wait.
Have you looked into HIPAA Compliance? Based on the level of detailed you have provided I doubt it.
 
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Trump's Staff
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Vinen said:
Wait.
Have you looked into HIPAA Compliance? Based on the level of detailed you have provided I doubt it.
Click to expand...
There is no hippa compliance because is not a related medical field. I was using that as an example of the situation where the government mandated electronic records.
 
A

a_skeleton_03

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Something like this already exists and uses Elastic Search for its backend I think. Let me find it and post a link.
 
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Trump's Staff
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That is exactly what mine does/ the user needs. Cool lets see if it is cheaper =)
 
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skrala

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Maybe I'm not understanding, but it sounds like you're just talking about a DMS. There are a lot of companies that have been doing this for a long time, both on-prem and hosted. Something like NetDocuments does this really well hosted & isn't all that expensive, and they've already done all the requisite security compliance that companies are requiring nowadays. On-prem small shops have been using Worldox for a long time, or Worksite/Edocs if they're larger.
 
LulzSect

LulzSect

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Khane

Khane

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skrala said:
Maybe I'm not understanding, but it sounds like you're just talking about a DMS. There are a lot of companies that have been doing this for a long time, both on-prem and hosted. Something like NetDocuments does this really well hosted & isn't all that expensive, and they've already done all the requisite security compliance that companies are requiring nowadays. On-prem small shops have been using Worldox for a long time, or Worksite/Edocs if they're larger.
Click to expand...

Yea, DMS/CRM... it's all the same and there are literally hundreds of them. And a ton of them are dirt cheap. Not sure where he's going with this.
 
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Trump's Staff
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So I had my first sale pitch, made the mistake of not lying to the customer. They asked If i could integrate my website with the bank account of the company. I told them that it was going to be expensive. I should have just said "No problem" and then stick them with the bill.
Overall it went well.

I went down to $100 a month. I did had to change some Azure options to bring down the hosting costs.
 
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