Ask HN: Is above 1000 a month too expensive?

[win66]

Software license. Unlimited seats. Per Site. I don't know anything about how to price, just considering what's the value of this. This will price out smaller buyers, but will it be too expensive for larger business consumers?

I haven't worked out the marketing yet but the product is at https://github.com/dosyago/BrowserGap

I guess I'm wondering how this compares to other relatively expensive business software license purchases, and what people's gut reaction is, to what I think is a very expensive price. A quick summary is it's a browser you can embed in your web app, one use case is to unify user flows across disparate applications.

[mattbrewsbytes]

If you get more specific about a problem/pain it solves that costs lots of money and headaches then that might be too low.

The use case I'm thinking of is a user in a call center environment that needs to process a customers credit card transaction. PCI compliance level could dictate that card info not sit in rest on that call center network (I haven't worked in that space in a while). They could use your app to securely run a remote browser on a PCI compliant network and do the transaction.

Sometimes this is solved with hardware from vendors so the call center person has a separate device they need to use to process the transaction (basically a terminal on a protected network). Sometimes the call center is an outsourced function that scales up with call volume and more capacity is restricted to the number of people that have the special hardware.

If its possible to replace the hardware with software and be compliant, that removes a lot of operational cost from the business, way more than $12k/year.

[win66]

That's a good idea. would it be a bad idea to reach out to my email with some names of companies in this space? I just wouldn't know where to start, it send that what you know would be very helpful. [e-mail]

[mattbrewsbytes]

You would have to become versed in PCI compliance and the ins/outs of different levels of that to know if your solution is 100% in line with what the latest security guidance is.

Any company that does a lot of CC processing could be a candidate, throw a dart at the Fortune 500 list and you'll likely hit one. Typically those types of companies expect enterprise solutions.

Small businesses might be a better starting point in that space but they won't have deep pockets. This thread [0] gives a perspective of PCI compliance challenge, security scans, etc.

PCI is just one aspect that I thought of where your solution might fit, there are probably other similar information security pain points you could explore.

[0] https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/214513/being-to...

[muzani]

Compare to your competitors. I've worked for a place that charges about as much, but people line up to buy it because their competitors charge ten times more.

If you have no competition, your competitor is whatever hack the client is doing. In many business applications, that's hiring qualified people to gather the data, enter it, process it, upload it.

In your case, it might be a feature your clients are building themselves. $1000 might be about 20 man hours. If they're spending that much per month on it, it's an easy buy.

[lol636363]

One of my client charged $100k+ for their SaaS product. It simply guided clients to setup their IT budgets. They had 10s of customers. The value this software provided was worth it to the right customer.

[win66]

Per year?

[lol636363]

Yeah per year. Tbf they also provided a lot of hands on consulting and training too.

[lvturner]

I mean, it depends, for a company of 2-10 people, it's astronomical, if I have over 1000 people at one location who are using it, it's waaaay to cheap.

[muzani]

If it's a company of 6 people who have one engineer hired full time to build and maintain the feature, it's cheap.

[brudgers]

If it solves a meaningful business problem for an adequately capitalized business, $1000/month is approximately free. Solving meaningful business problems for adequately capitalized businesses is a sound basis for a business. And charging $1000/month means you can have an adequately funded business with only a 100 customers or so. Which means you can provide good customer support.

[auganov]

Above a certain price point you probably want an ad hoc sales process. $1000 flat rate sounds like an awkward price point. Expensive enough to not get any random sales, but might be too cheap to build a big B2B business around it. Especially if the market is small. You want to extract as much as possible from people who can pay.

At this price you'll be doing calls either way. Why give the price away?

[chris11]

Also, it sounds close to a limit where a buyer would need to get the purchase approved. I don't know what common approval limits for team spending are, but sales will be easier if people don't need to go through a long process to get it approved.

[win66]

You mean, why advertise what the price is? Or give it away too cheaply? I don't understand the idea of not advertising the price... is it basically to charge each customer a custom price?

[auganov]

> is it basically to charge each customer a custom price?

Yes. You just have a "contact sales" type of stuff on the website and promotional materials instead of an actual pricing page. Very common in high ticket B2B.

I don't understand the product or use case too well to suggest how to price it. But I understand that usage would vary widely between customers. Hence price should vary greatly too.

I don't know what's your situation and how well connected you are in this industry. But generally at this price point people won't just come on your site and buy it. There will be some back and forth either way. And you probably will have to do outreach. So going to have a lot of opportunities to discuss price.

At this point it sounds to me like your greatest priority should be to actually talk to some customers.

[codingdave]

How much money would it cost your customers to solve the same problem without your software? If they are spending more than $1000 a month already on this problem, then they can afford the software at that price.