Hi community,

I’ve been running a software development company for about 9 years, and I could really use some advice from anyone else with experience in this industry - either as a buyer or seller.

We help businesses migrate from Excel spreadsheets to web-based applicaitons, and we’ve found a decent client base within the UK. A typical project will take anywhere between 5-25 days of development which translates to a couple of weeks to a few months of project time.

My original business model was to offer fixed price projects, based on an estimate of effort and a daily rate, e.g. 20 days @ £1,200 = £24k project. If I end up going over, I absorb the cost, and if I complete it under then good for me. This has worked very well in terms of making a decent annual income to sustain myself and one other dev - however, I did not have any recurring revenue as I would charge hosting at cost, and offer support for free on a “best efforts” basis.

Typically, our solutions have between 5-50 users as they are internall line-of-business systems

Here’s the bit where everyone laughs at me. Originally, I offered SLAs for support…with the first one at £50 a month. I have since quickly learnt and upped that to anywhere between £300 and £900 per month depending on the SLA, but I never really considered user count as none of our clients have more than 50 users.

Recently I was asked to build a solution that will be used by 2,000 users. Technically, this is not an issue for us, but I was thinking around the monthly price for this. Do I charge on a per-user basis, and if so, what would the expected amount be? (This is not for a helpdesk, that will be handled by my client, but for support/maintenance/hosting of the solution.)

My goal is to up the MRR in order to hire more devs/sales and scale up the business, but there’s very little information out there around what people are willing to pay for bespoke, so any advice would be appreciated!