There’s a good discussion of software pricing here:
My favorite quote:
“…There’s no software priced between $1000 and $75,000. I’ll tell you why. The minute you charge more than $1000 you need to get serious corporate signoffs. You need a line item in their budget. You need purchasing managers and CEO approval and competitive bids and paperwork. So you need to send a salesperson out to the customer to do PowerPoint…”
Honestly, $90K may very well be the fair equilibrium price for that software. If volume is low enough and you’re paying good programmers to make a quality product with good documentation, you may only be making an industry standard profit on this product.
My employer makes software much more expensive than this company you’re describing. It’s very specialized stuff, and I’m guessing we have a low two-digit number of clients. We do not really make a killing on that product. The per unit price is very nice, but there is a lot of overhead in this kind of operation, and we spend more time than you could imagine providing support under warranty/contract to customers. Some of the clients we support are so good at generating headaches for us that it makes my eyes water.
Is your package good? Real good?
Is it stable?
As much as I support free software, I suggest that if you release it free and open source, it will do the world less good than if you were to release it for $995 with a $695 annual upgrade/maintenance package, and then charge $350 per hour to provide support or consulting for implementations.
Are you too socially impaired, like me, to sell the product?
That’s fine. At this price point, it will practically sell itself if it is viable. Create, or pay someone to create, a pretty web site with a bunch of screen shots.
Put a shopping card on the site.
If it takes off, you’ll have the money to farm out support and maybe even development. Or, let the big guys buy you out. If it doesn’t take off, go ahead and release it as freeware in six months.
How do you explain Linux then? That’s free. :dubious:
Anyway, bluetrust, IANYL (standard disclaimers and all that), though I used to deal with this type of stuff all the time. First of all, get your documentation in order. Second, you’re not really a threat if you’re not in market. How is your company supposed to know your product even works? You need demos. Third, patent infringement suits are super-pesky, and I’ve work with companies who will have no issue trying to put you in the poor house. I hope you took good notes/journal, and can readily prove (though, wait for a subpoena) that your source code is independent of your company’s. Fourth, I’m not sure what your employment status is with your company you want to “extort” (which I would call that legally, imo), but if you want to keep your job, I would try to keep that stuff to yourself. Fifth, do you know all those employment agreements you signed when you first started? I’m pretty sure one of them says that they own anything you make. In general, they’re not that broad, but if you’re doing a derivative of their proprietary software, then I can guarantee that their will be issues. Sixth, you might run afoul of your company’s own proprietary/confidential policies. The best way to avoid this is to ensure that your software isn’t based of your company’s.
Selling and developing a competing software product isn’t as hard as it looks, imo. My first job after leaving my firm was to work for a startup. I accompanied my sales team to almost all of their sales calls. If those buffoons could do it, anyone with half a brain can do it, too. Your biggest obstacle is going to be getting a sales lead. You need to know procurement people, IT managers, data center managers, (and in your case, marketing managers), etc. Offer to do them demos and take them out to eat and stuff. I’ve seen people who started out of their garage (system security), and they started by giving the stuff away for free. Like you and at least one other have said, you can charge consulting and maintenance. Also, $90k in the software world isn’t that huge of a cost, especially if its enterprise software.
You mean ‘in your opinion’, because I’m not buying your personal code of ethics, and you already know that you can’t objectively prove this particular scenario is unethical to anyone but yourself.
Yes, but as I understand it, it is also customizable in ways commercially-available programs are not. That is an improvement, ergo it makes people who want a customizable item happy, ergo it is ethical, as it provides that which cannot be had otherwise.
Ethics are derived in part from one’s personal philosophy. They are therefore not a completely objective phenomina, being influenced by our individual perceptions of life.
I provided a link to an article on Utilitarianism. I suggest you read it, & apply it to what I have already written.
Will the introduction of this new program make more people happy than the rather extortive approach in the OP? If “yes”, then it is the more ethical of the two.
Go away, little man, we will throw money at you WHEN you start stealing our market share. Until then, you are a low risk and not worth compensating for.
Bosda, I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t care about Utilitarianism or your adventures in the ethics of utility. But if you want to flog a particular philosophy, GD is right place to do it.
I work in a museum. We want to computerize our inventory-- hundreds of thousands of artifacts-- so that they are searchable by researchers and the general public. We’ve had this plan in the works of years now, but our problem is funding. Just like in the OP, the software which is most commonly used by museums for this purpose is outrageously expensive. We only have five people on staff, and a budget which makes deciding between buying vaccuum cleaner bags and archival materials the subject of a board meeting.
We would sing praises to the gods if someone did with museum software what the OP is suggesting.
Ain’t it funny how a philosophical school that does not explicitly mark slavery as a bad thing would find flaw with some honest to god competition in the software industry.
I like your plan (especially when taking into account the Joel on Software article.) There isn’t anything sacrificed with this approach. It’s a little more work but is pretty great.
Thank you for taking the time to offer a different approach. I sincerely appreciate it. When working on the same project for so long, sometimes it’s easy to get stuck in the same train of thought and not realize that other solutions could work better.
I really appreciate your thanks. That was probably the biggest thank you I’ve gotten on this board in years.
Let us know how this turns out. I’d love to hear!
