How to charge for an on-line application (applet)?

[xtempore]

Working out the right price for any product or service can be tricky, but for any kind of software it is doubly so. And for web-based more complex again.

If I sell an apple, then the person buying the apple can eat it once. It's not too difficult to put a value on that.

Selling software though...? One copy of software can be used by a lot of people, and for varying amounts of time. It becomes very hard to know how to price that software. For traditional software, a "per seat" price is often used, but for web-based software this becomes difficult.

So, let me get down to specifics...

I have been working with a long-term client to develop an on-line version of their coloring book software - Kea Coloring Book. This is not your basic coloring book applet, but a much more feature rich web application. The plan is to licence the product to other websites.

But the question is how to structure the pricing? Ideally the client wants to make the coloring book affordable for small website owners, and at the same time to make a more sizeable return when the product is used by larger, more commercial sites.

How would you go about pricing the Kea Coloring Book?

Do you have any other advice on how to market this product to webmasters / businesses?

Thanks.

[Tubby]

I like the online version. I think it could easily be sold. .

I have no advise to offer about prices without thinking or researching it for a week or two .

Nice. .

[wige]

Interesting problem. The first thing that came to my mind would be billing per mil, the way you would charge for branding ads. For every x,000 visitors the site has, you bill $xx for the license. However, this might be a hard sell.

While I understand the reasoning behind the making the pricing scale so you can balance affordability with profitability, is there a difference between the version that will be displayed on a small site vs the version that a larger site would use? Will you be hosting the application as a service (and thus have bandwidth costs you need to offset)? If not, the larger sites will be left to ask why they have to pay more for the same software, when they are in effect putting your product in front of more users.

If you are hosting the app, charging per x users would probably be a reasonable way to get the cost scalable. If you provide the software to other sites, I think offering different levels of functionality to the monthly/yearly license would give you the most effective means of scaling price. You could enable features such as the ability to display rotating call of action or advertising messages embedded in the app, or support for additional images for coloring, all as optional add-ins that sites with higher budgets could opt for.

[Peopleunit]

I think you should offer a free version that includes a limited library of coloring books to choose from. After all, you're offering a free offline downloaded version for free already.

Then charge for various enhancements. Things such as coloring books that include a series of pictures which tell a story. Custom enhancements such as product tie-ins and branding could be another enhancement. In other words give away the core product, then charge for additional or custom content.

The larger sites would probably be most interested in product tie-ins and such, so I'd probably charge (quite a bit) more for that. For those who have the talent (flash programmers, etc) to produce their own content, offer them a one-off single domain site license.

I think you have the start of an interesting product, looking forward to future enhancements!

[Uncle Dog]

'Off the wall', and it will require a little more programming work but... how about charging for paint?

If users don't paint much and then quit... it's cheap.
If they love it and paint all day... then you're laughing (and hopefully you'll remember Uncle Dog)

[xtempore]

Thanks for your suggestions and thoughts. It's given me a bit to think about.

I think there's a good chance that there will soon need to be a simpler version for the low-budget sites, especially because at present the main cost for them is in converting their images for use with the coloring book, which is a rather manual process.

Maybe we should consider the idea of a hosted solution. It would certainly give us a more obvious angle in terms of charging more to higher use sites.

Thanks again - and if you have any other ideas let me know.

[scvmarketer]

I may be interested in it... PM me with details. I need a pretty serious web form solution.

SCV