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Pricing my new web app and controlling access to it


Guest psn

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Hello, I'm new to the forum and would really appreciate a bit of advice. (Sorry this is so long.)

 

I found a company that had a need for an application and we were able to create a web page that will be very useful for this company, and *maybe* a few similar companies in the future as well. Now I am trying to solve 2 related issues: 1.) How to best offer/limit access to the site, and 2.) What to charge for using it.

 

The site uses javascript and php. It does fairly complex calculations based on input from the user and produces a nice graphical output of the results. Management previously had to do these calculations manually and it might take 20 minutes whereas now they can do it in 5 and get more reliable numbers. While the managers only have to do the calculations about 10 times per day on average, if they happen to get the number wrong it can potentially cost them tens of thousands of dollars!

 

Question #1.) How to best offer/limit access to the site?:

So, the page is built and works great, but right now I just use .htaccess and a few passwords to limit access to the site.

I would like to charge them a monthly/yearly subscription to use the site. They work multiple shifts at this location. There are approx 5-6 managers in all that would use the site. They generally share two computers (although rarely they might like to use it from somewhere else - that's not a requirement).

I don't know what the best option is for allowing them access. If it's done solely by Username/Password, then what's to stop them from paying for one user and then sharing it among all 5 or 6? That would be fine if I priced it higher, but then what would stop them from sharing those credentials with people who work for an entirely different company? (Looking for multiple simultaneous logins from the same user? / Licensing somehow by device - don't even know how this could be done.) There's no database involved currently, but one idea was to display the user's name, email address, or other personally identifiable information on the screen when logged in so that they wouldn't want to give out their credentials. I could continue to ramble on about other ways I've considered to approach this, but I'll leave it for now to let you guys chime in.

 

Question #2.) What to charge to use the site?:

(Obviously, this also depends somewhat on #1 above.) A good programmer could build this in a week or less so its not terribly difficult, but the problem that it solves could be *very* expensive to the company. Ideally, there would actually be two levels of access to the site. Level One would be for the employees who would only use the site about once per day and about 2-3 times per week but may need to use it from a mobile device or from home. There could be a hundred of those users but I doubt they would pay more than $1-2 per month. The 2nd level would be for the Management that might use the site several times a day, all week long, but would generally be in the office on one of two computers. These guys should see real value and be willing to pay much, much more each month.

 

Thank you to those who have managed to read this far! I'm very interested to hear your thoughts!!

(Although I work in IT, it has nothing to do with web development so I am working with another programmer and I'm looking for guidance on which way to proceed.)

-Chad PSN

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For #1, you could create a PHP/MySQL based administration system that would handle providing users access and would allow an administrator to add/remove/edit user information. There are quite a few of these types of tutorials available online, or KillerSites offers two different series that cover the basics to subscribers to the KillerSites Video Tutorial Library (http://www.killersites.com/university) within the PHP section ("PHP Login" and "PHP Login with OOP & MVC").

 

As for #2, that's really something we can't help you with. That's really up to you, based on your market research and (hopefully) talking to potential customers. I'm pretty sure that I, as a web designer, am not in your target market. My advice, however, would be to price it based on value, not on the amount of time that it took to create the website.

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