| It's a shitty situation, and it seems unlikely that you will have a good path to monetize your work - and approaching it wrong can cost you your job. If it's something that's specific to your company and there is no market outside it, you have one customer that at the same time has strong leverage over you due to your current employment. If it's something that could be generally useful, you likely still don't have a market: if your product ever became popular, the big-name company selling the original software could add it as a feature or paid extension and would have a huge marketing advantage over you. The company you currently work for will likely not be willing to pay much for your work, and might take offense and fire you if you try to negotiate too hard. They could also decide that your new job is writing this thing... You could try to leverage it for a bonus or promotion or something like that. That's unlikely to capture a significant amount of the value you provide, but so are the other options. If you think the idea in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44080196 will fly, you could try that. I think it's unlikely to fly but it's the option that likely pays out best if it does fly, and if you approach it carefully ("this is outside the scope of my role and my department, but I could do it in my free time"), you might be able to pull it off with limited risk. You also need to understand how decision processes work at your company and optimize your proposal for it. If it's more work to get legal to approve the contract with you than to get approval to pay 10x as much to the original vendor to add something half as good as a feature, the vendor gets the job. |