LemonStand Blog

Announcement: Pricing and value

21 | published by Danny Halarewich on Thursday, September 10, 2009

As we draw closer to releasing the beta and ultimately version 1.0 of LemonStand, we are determining more things in regards to our pricing, licensing technology, distribution, customer management, tech support and the LemonStand Marketplace.

Aleksey Bobkov and myself, Danny Halarewich the co-founders of LemonStand have been planning the details of these things for quite some time now. And we are ready to make a few announcements, even if certain things are not written in stone (it's more like sand at the moment).

Pricing

There is a huge range of prices for eCommerce products. From free (open source with no support), to thousands or tens-of-thousands of dollars per license (so called "enterprise" level). When determining a price, we had to consider the value we are providing, uniqueness and who our target market is. It's no secret that our main customers will be web designers, developers and agencies. We believe that our solution is unique and addresses a major problem that noone else has done effectively. While considering those things we came to a few conclusions.

Our main customers are repeat ones

Web professionals and agencies usually complete more than 1 project each month. And with the continued growth of eCommerce, many of those projects are perfect candidates for leveraging LemonStand. With that in mind we will be offering tiered pricing for our customers. The more you use LemonStand, the more benefits you'll get, including lower pricing.

Value added services

Web professionals need ways to promote themselves and win projects. We'll be offering partner programs to help you do this. Certain opportunities will be available simply by becoming our customer, and others will be available for people enrolled in higher-level partnerships with us. These opportunities will result in you ultimately getting more projects. There will also be access to "insider information" accessible only to customers and/or partners that will provide early announcements and tips on using LemonStand. We have many things in the oven right now, and will make specific announcements closer to launch.

Support

We had planned to provide email support for customers for 1-year right from the start. This is a major differentiator between a commercial product and open-source. We also plan to offer high-levels of support (probably after launch though) for customers that need it. The details are being worked out, but this might mean telephone support or faster email response times.

What's the verdict?

After considering all of the value we're offering, and the cost of providing proper support, we have come up with a price that we feel will work for us and you. That is around $300 USD, per-license. Each license is good for 1 website. You may also use this license for a development environment.

Some extra things to consider

We anticipate that we'll provide an initial discount for our beta testers. We may also open up for pre-orders prior to release as well, which would earn you a discount. And don't forget that LemonStand will use tiered pricing, so the more sites you build with it, the bigger your discount.

This price leaves much room for profits if you are creating websites for any sort of profit, whether you are building them for customers or selling products yourself.