CMS pricing

Hi, i'v made a fully functional CMS. I was wondering what i should charge for it? It is completely custom made for my customers, however i started working on it when one partical person asked me to. We agreed on $50.00 and a simple one, yet it turned out to be a fully functional one. He is planning on using it for his clients' clan sites. My partner suggested i should be paid by license, meaning everytime he profits more by using my CMS, i should get certain percentage of his profit.

Any ideas? Advices? Recommendations? Greatly appreciated!

Thanks guys

Originally Posted by Dray Hi, i'v made a fully functional CMS. I was wondering what i should charge for it? It is completely custom made for my customers, however i started working on it when one partical person asked me to. We agreed on $50.00 and a simple one, yet it turned out to be a fully functional one. He is planning on using it for his clients' clan sites. My partner suggested i should be paid by license, meaning everytime he profits more by using my CMS, i should get certain percentage of his profit. Any ideas? Advices? Recommendations? Greatly appreciated! Thanks guys

I actually wrote an article regarding software licensing + pricing and how to enforce it for the August edition of php|architect - http://www.phparch.com/. It covers both sides of the coin - what to charge for your product, and then how to enforce your pricing. You can buy the issue in PDF for about $3.50 (US). I'm obviously biased, but I think you might find it very interesting, informative and useful The example I used in the article was actually a CMS system, and so it's very relevant to what you want.

The quick answer is that I suggest you charge him per license rather than a percentage of the profits.

Well, if you're selling it one off then simply charge for your time. If the cms took you 2 weeks to build, charge for 2 weeks of your time...which would probably be quite alot

With regards to taking a %, it depends what sort of contract you had (if you had any?). Does he have the source files? If so, technically you can't ask for any money if he wishes to resell it or what not. I'd probably be keen to take 25% per sale.

i don't see how it would be possible for him not to have the source files if he uses it.

I would be more inclined to go with the first statement Robson made about charging for how long it took to build it.

This is what I do with my clients and because each client wants something a little different I usually have to do a bit of tweaking. If you can build a system where the tweaking doesnt take very long then you can take very nice profits on the system you've designed. I always think of it from the point of view that the general public don't really know what a content management system is and they are the ones paying the money so you're better charging them for your time rather than selling it to some other designer who's going to make more money out of your design.