Re: Cheap or expensive ?

"Vincent Callut" <vincent.callut@silicium14.net> wrote ... > I developed an extranet (several password protected levels) > for one of my clients. Main functionnalities : forum, newsletters, > agenda, members section, etc. I proposed him to host his > website and database on a system WinNT4-Apache-MySQL-PHP4. > I asked 125 USD (taxes included) per month for that. The service > proposed offers unlimited disk space, database monitoring, > maintenance and backups. > > Do you think it's a correct price or do you think it's too expensive ? Take your fixed costs (e.g. the cost of the presumably dedicated server hardware, the NT 4 Server license, etc.) and amortize them over 18 months. Add your ongoing costs (e.g. what you pay for the bandwidth you are going to need to provide this service, the fully-overheaded cost of the three square feet of office space the server is going to occupy, etc.,), marked up by say 10-20%. Add the time it is going to take you to provide the service every month (e.g. changing daily backup tapes, the database monitoring you mentioned, maintenance, etc.) multiplied by your charge-out rate (probably 2-3 times what you pay the employee who does the work). That is the minimum you should charge to break even. Whether the client will actually pay this amount depends on how he values the extranet services themselves. Charge more if you think he does. But don't charge less unless you want to make a loss. Your figure of $125pm sounds far too low to me, unless you are running lots of these extranet services on the same hardware and can spread the costs amongst them.