Pricing Web Services

Let's take a more detailed look at pricing options. Here's what I think we want to accomplish:

1. Neatly scaling revenue as service grows
2. Affordable and simple pricing
3. Revenue streams for client, designers, coders, resellers, futurilla

Some ideas:

Futurilla: service charge for managing portal (scale, but ideally zero - can we cut to the chase on this?), job handling commission, specialised services.
LGD: design fee, per-page design, monthly support, page redesign, site management
Designers and coders: one-off design fees (this needs to be predictable)
Clients: Adsense, PayPal, e-commerce facilities.

In conversation we've discussed the idea of a marketplace for services with pricing responsive to urgency and availability. Certainly this needs to be considered, but is outside the scope of getting things started. Predictability of costs is an issue and keeping things to small atomic units might help, both for clients and suppliers; it's harder for costs to mushroom when they're small, simple jobs priced according to time and completed rapidly. Payments too need to be small and responsive to needs: Having a web page redesigned should be as simple as buying something from eBay; and both can use PayPal.

Notes:

It's important that clients should have lots of options for updating content themselves. Note that here we're not making any assumptions about the kind of website, nor whether it's static, dynamic, blog or any combination of things. This is purely about the managing of the design work and service.

The myprotova pricing is worth revisiting. This had a free option, with a three-tier paid service (create, design, develop). I'll try to dig out the documentation and see if there's anything worth exploring there.

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