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SaaS: For Initial Users: Sell User License or make it into SaaS?
LG
LG
Liam Gooding, CEO of Trakio, Customer Analytics Platform answered:

Always default to SaaS and only offer one-off licenses in exceptional circumstances.

Is your product for individuals, SMB's or larger enterprise?

I've spoken with many entrepreneurs who have sold products on a per-license and all of them are either in the process of transitioning to, or are already, selling their product under a new SaaS model.

The cloud infrastructures in place today make launching a SaaS product much, much easier for the average developer. The common term for these is "PaaS" or "Platform As A Service" and they vary from very 'generic & flexible' cloud platforms like Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Digital Ocean, to more specialised services like Heroku (Ruby on Rails), MongoHQ (MongoDB databases), PagadoBox (PHP).

All of these services have some kind of free tier for getting a new app started and for development, and then have very granular pricing for slowly scaling the cost of your cloud hosting with the size of your offering.

Nearly all platforms offer redundancy once you're on a paid tier, meaning if their physical hardware has a failure, your app will automagically be moved to a new piece of phsyical hardware and thus you'll have minimal/zero downtime. As you scale up, you can make this even more sophisticated with the right sys admin team working on it for you.

If you're launching a pretty simple B2B SaaS app like a project management or invoicing app, then your hosting costs will be negligible compared to your scale & revenue (excluding employee cost to manage). If you're launching something that involves media (pictures, videos, MP3's) then even on cloud PaaS, your hosting costs will still be quite significant, and you should have a chat with someone to estimate your costs first.

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