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Ask HN: How to charge for a white-label web app?

6 points by podman ↗ HN
A couple of years ago I built http://www.boostcam.com Ever since, I've been getting a request every few months from people asking to license the technology or white-label it. For a while I just couldn't be bothered. I thought it was going to be too much work and I was already more than making back my hosting costs through my AdSense revenue.

After I got another request today, I figured I might as well cease the opportunity and try to capitalize on it. I really don't feel like licensing and letting people run it on their own hardware since that seems like too much because it could turn into a support nightmare White-labeling as a hosted service, on the other hand seems like a much better option. I really have no idea how much to charge for something like this though. Should I charge monthly? ($50/month, $100? $1,000?) or should I charge per video chat session?

What do you guys think?

5 comments

[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 8.1 ms ] thread
whimsy
Cool app.

Perhaps a tiered plan based on usage? Or number of users?

eston
Charge small, charge often.

The EC2/Rackspace Cloud type of micropayment system is what I'd use here. Charge per chat session to begin with.

Why?

1. Psychologically, to the consumer of the solution, each chat session seems way cheaper. Getting somebody to sign on to paying 0.025 cents a session is easier than getting somebody to sign onto a $30 or $50/month solution, even though in the end the number of chat sessions may add up in your favour.

2. Most potential value is captured. Charging per chat session takes out the hard work of calculating large, tiered pricing models to capture your consumer base. Think microeconomics: a small-time user might want to pay you $10/mo for a few chat sessions, but your pricing starts at $30/month.

3. You can always add tiers later that are based on usage by scaling down the price as quantity goes up (a traditional economy of scale.) Have somebody running through tens of thousands of requests? Give them a slightly lower price.

GBond
Consider a tiered plan based on full-branding vs semi-branded.
podman
Most people seem to be suggesting a pricing model based on the number of chat sessions. Something interesting that I noticed is that users will often start a session but no one else will join. The ratio of joins to session starts is around 1 to 6. That makes me wonder if I should charge per session started or per session joined. Something interesting to notes is that the actual video chatting incurs no cost to me because it's all peer to peer. So the only real work happening on the server is passing along chat session ids to the clients.

The one problem I have with charging per session (and most services that charge based on usage for something they don't really control) is that the client might not have any sense of what their usage is like until they get a bill.

tobowers
I would go tiered. Per-chat session is great until you try to collect on someone who has a $0.025 bill. I'd start with a small monthly fee ($30/mo) + per chat session. If that doesn't seem to be capturing the hearts and minds of your licensees - then go into a tiered approach for "capped chat sessions" with overages.