Ask HN: How do I turn a B2C SaaS product into a self-hosted enterprise product?
3 by rococode | 0 comments on Hacker News.
I've been working on a SaaS tool for a while, selling it B2C. People come across the product, sign up with their emails, and pay for a subscription if they like it. It's useful on an individual level, not inherently team-oriented. In the past few months, I've gotten a couple inquiries from fairly big companies asking about a self-hosted/on-prem version. The usual reason is that they need the user data that my tool helps with to not be sent to any third party. I've never done any sort of enterprise sales so I have only a vague idea of how much extra effort would be required and whether the reward would be worth it. I've done some research but couldn't find much info out there - it doesn't help that most enterprise offerings are just "Contact us for more info". Would really appreciate any insights on any of my questions! == Effort == 1. How is self-hosted software typically deployed? Would I just be handing them some docker containers and instructions, or would I be the one setting it up on their machines in a kind of support capacity? Or is there a standardized way of doing it? Right now my infrastructure is reasonably portable, it's all on AWS but it's basically just a couple different containers that I manually setup (no Kubernetes) and a database or two. 2. How "safe" is it for my own business? Do I need to have a lawyer draw up some service contract? Do I need to obfuscate my code in case they "borrow" it or should that not be a concern? (these are fairly well known companies in completely different industries from what my tool does) 3. How many decision steps are there typically between "Do you have a self-hosted version?" and "Ok, let's do it."? I have a couple inbound leads but if I spend X amount of time building out a self-hosted version and none of them end up actually paying for it, that seems like a bad use of my time since I don't know how to find more leads. == Pricing == 1. What kind of pricing model is common in a self-hosted scenario? Is it still a license per user, say $X/year? A one-time payment with ongoing support/maintenance costs? 2. My SaaS costs about $10 a month for regular people. How much does that scale up for a self-hosted version being sold to a company? Now it's $20 / user? $50? $100?