I've been working on a SaaS tool for a while, selling it B2C. People come across the product, sign up with their emails, and pay for a subscription if they like it. It's useful on an individual level, not inherently team-oriented.<p>In the past few months, I've gotten a couple inquiries from fairly big companies asking about a self-hosted/on-prem version. The usual reason is that they need the user data that my tool helps with to not be sent to any third party.<p>I've never done any sort of enterprise sales so I have only a vague idea of how much extra effort would be required and whether the reward would be worth it.<p>I've done some research but couldn't find much info out there - it doesn't help that most enterprise offerings are just "Contact us for more info". Would really appreciate any insights on any of my questions!<p>== Effort ==<p>1. How is self-hosted software typically deployed? Would I just be handing them some docker containers and instructions, or would I be the one setting it up on their machines in a kind of support capacity? Or is there a standardized way of doing it? Right now my infrastructure is reasonably portable, it's all on AWS but it's basically just a couple different containers that I manually setup (no Kubernetes) and a database or two.<p>2. How "safe" is it for my own business? Do I need to have a lawyer draw up some service contract? Do I need to obfuscate my code in case they "borrow" it or should that not be a concern? (these are fairly well known companies in completely different industries from what my tool does)<p>3. How many decision steps are there typically between "Do you have a self-hosted version?" and "Ok, let's do it."? I have a couple inbound leads but if I spend X amount of time building out a self-hosted version and none of them end up actually paying for it, that seems like a bad use of my time since I don't know how to find more leads.<p>== Pricing ==<p>1. What kind of pricing model is common in a self-hosted scenario? Is it still a license per user, say $X/year? A one-time payment with ongoing support/maintenance costs?<p>2. My SaaS costs about $10 a month for regular people. How much does that scale up for a self-hosted version being sold to a company? Now it's $20 / user? $50? $100?
If I'm reading correct you're a solo-entrepeneur. It will be hardly worth your time, regardless of future promising revenue.<p>The negotiations can take months, involve many departments, forms (like 20 page security questionairs), custom contract, multiple reviews, strict SLAs. Some companies ask for code escrow (in case your business goes bankrupt). And that's just the business aspect.<p>On the tech side creating private docker images for their devops team to install seems alright. I've also heard stories where you'd only get a username & password and have to use a special VPN with in-browser terminal and very limited permissions to install the software. If it breaks, and it could be as simple as full harddrive, expect you will be contacted to deal with it. Their operating systems and frameworks (let's say nodejs or java versions) might be out of date. And dealing with issues can involve multiple departments again.<p>Over the years your contacts at the enterprise company will change without notice. The new contacts won't know any of the contract deals. I've been on a call with 8 people and none of them was aware what the URL to the specific documentation page we created for them was, or the special monitoring solution they asked for (0 pageviews).<p>Lastly you want to add features to your SaaS but the big client wants different features, or refuse to move to the latest version. You risk having to maintain two versions.<p>You need to charge a lot for the extra work.<p>> What kind of pricing model is common in a self-hosted scenario? Is it still a license per user, say $X/year? A one-time payment with ongoing support/maintenance costs?<p>Setup fee plus base monthly fee. Let's say 10.000 USD plus 2.000 USD per month for x seats. Plus extra for additional seats. You can also try a prototype or discovery fee where you spend time developing the solution, test it on their infrastructure and if they're not happy they still have to pay. Minimum 12 month contract (they might ask for 6 or 12 month termination period).<p>On AWS Marketplace you can offer an app where the customer pays for hardware and you deploy an image. That pricing model is per hour and can be cancelled anytime.
I recommend reading the guides on EnterpriseReady, such as this one [0] for deployment.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.enterpriseready.io/features/deployment-options/" rel="nofollow">https://www.enterpriseready.io/features/deployment-options/</a>