Steven Brown

There’s a very important, simple, and significant change you can make to your pricing model that will seriously change your business. Clients and developers are both locked in a world of start-stop development. Have an idea, get a quote, make it, roll in the piles of money. Clearly this is entirely unrealistic. Business never just stops. Ideas are always evolving, markets constantly change, competitors improve, new products are released. So why should any development project be start-stop?

Explaining this to a client can sometimes be difficult, not because it doesn’t make sense, but more because they want the security and comfort of knowing an exact dollar value for their site, an exact date it will be finished, an exact feature list. The truth is the cost is ongoing, the work never ends, and the features constantly evolve.

So you need to give them their comfort, but how? Well you just need to break things down. The cost for development this month is $2000, that will include a fixed feature list to be completed by the end of the month, at which point the next set of features will be developed, or a list of improvements will be made.

Giving a fixed regular amount has many benefits for both client and developer. For a start it is Cash Flow Development, so it becomes more affordable and lower risk for the client, and means more consistent and lower risk income for the developer.

An ongoing development cycle allows the development to change with the needs of the business. When the market changes, competition get stronger, laws change, or anything else that changes the business direction, the development can follow it with little or no delay. It does take some management, and some development gets lost, but the business can stay agile and competitive.

If the development is handled correctly the income earned from early features can be recycled to pay for ongoing development, improvements and new features. Ideally the site would become self-funded.

Most importantly of all, it gets the client thinking about development as an ongoing concept. Too often clients have the misconception that you can throw some money at a site, get it developed and then suddenly the sales will roar in and they will never have to work again. The financial structure of ongoing development gets them thinking, and realising they need to spend time and energy on this thing for weeks, months, years to come.