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by eb0la 5674 days ago
Warning!

Before you figure out (yet) how much to charge. Patent your business first!

Before you sell anything to a big corporation, you should hava a patent ready for your product.

Why? because without a patent your product is a commodity and will be treated as such by the procurement dept. at the big corporation.

In my country (Spain) we don't have software patents, and this is what happens:

- The first year you sell the product to the big corporation. You're happy and rejoice.

- The next year, before you're about to renew the licensing agreement, the procurement departament asks several competing companies (mostly big contractors) for a "similar" product (where "similar" means, cheaper, with more or less the same functionality). Nobody has it, so you get the contract.

- The third year, one (or two) big contractors bid against you with a competing product and you have to lower your price to keep the contract.

- The fourth year, you cannot compete in price against the big contractors because they sell the "competing" product as a turnkey project... at the low per-hour rates big companies pay.

Hope this helps. Cheers