Sell a web app with limit per client?

Question

This is not a "classic" programming question, but it's related to our job. I develop and sell data driven web app for some customer, some small (10 employess or less), some bigger (1000-2000 employers).

My questions are:

1. Can i sell my app with different prices, based on customer's "dimension" ? Is it common in "software market"..isn't ?
2. How can "control" and maybe "limit to work" my asp.net web app when customer exceed their limit license ? Are there some ready-made server side component to do that ?

Thanks

EDIT: Last question: how to justify the higher price for big company against small price for smaller company ?

Answer 1

You can charge per active user, per connection.

You can charge additional amount for storage, for number of accounts/records.

You can charge on raw bandwidth used.

You can have a baseline product for all customers, with add-ons (more client logins, more bandwidth, more storage, more record, etc) as extra.

Don't cut off your customers midmonth. They'd really hate that. Send email/call saying that based on their utilization they are going to incur additional charges and that if they don't want to pay more they should limit themselves.

This allows you to not piss off your customers while letting them make the decision whether to start paying more.

Answer 2

1. Absolutely, yes this is common. The more users, the more your hosting, support, etc costs will go up. Makes sense.
2. There are lots of licensing systems that you can purchase. Here's just one.

Answer 3

This is common in the software industry, and can readily be presented to customers as being in their interest - if they don't need many users/processing capacity/pipes/data capacity (whatever it is) they pay less than people who need more. Their costs therefore scale with the value they receive from your product (if your scaling factor is appropriately chosen), and they can start with a limited investment and grow it over time.

btw, disclosure - I work for Agilis Software, a supplier of licensing software to software vendors.

You may want to put it in a 'warning-threshold' or a 'soft-limiter' or both. A warning threshold will let your user know when they are approaching their use limit, so need to purchase more capacity from you. A soft limit will warn your user when they exceed their purchased use limit but allow them to continue doing what they need to do, with your system recording their excess usage so you can go to them with hard data to request they expand their license with you etc.

Agilis's Orion license manager supports both these concepts, and if you're interested there are case studies up at the website showing how Orion is used.

Hope this helps,

Dominic