One of the most important things in business is to think scalable. If you want to start a business and dimension it only for the first 100 customers, than something is wrong with your plans and the business will most likely fail. We all see success stories from people that started a business without anticipating its grow, but this usually happens with businesses that offer something very innovative and in very few cases (I could not find any official statistics regarding this, but I am sure that less than the success rate in these conditions is less than 0.01%). Stocks offer a much better chance of making money. 🙂

I decided to write this article because sometimes I see comments from people that complain that a product is too expensive. Of course, pricing software right is a sensitive subject that involves many steps, but in most cases it is very easy to demonstrate that the product is a very good deal. Let’s discuss about 4PSA VoipNow pricing.

We know the facts:
– The unlimited license costs 1000USD (owned)
– On a decent server you can run 2000 extensions
– The minimum price/month you can charge an extension cannot be less than 5USD/month. 5USD is very low, but I wanted to provide a good example.

On a server that has 1000 extensions, the monthly software cost per extension is 0.083USD. This is 1.66% of the monthly customer invoice. I bet that you give more to your payment gateway to process the order 🙂

In this equation we do not talk only about software, but also about support. Open Source is great, but when it comes to problems most people do not know how to solve issues fast. Having access to the source means that anyone can theoretically solve the problem, but it does not mean that this will be free. Microsoft released a lot of studies that say that Open Source is expensive due to this reason (higher TCO). This is not true because a lot of vendors support Open Source, but it’s a concern for management. So take this into account also.

I recommend the following document that explains more the about hosted PBX business (in numbers).