Warning! Before you figure out (yet) how much to charge. Patent your business first! Before you sell anything to a big corporation, you should hava a patent r

Warning! Before you figure out (yet) how much to charge. Patent your business first! Before you sell anything to a big corporation, you should hava a patent ready for your product. Why? because without a patent your product is a commodity and will be treated as such by the procurement dept. at the big corporation. In my country (Spain) we don't have software patents, and this is what happens: - The first year you sell the product to the big corporation. You're happy and rejoice. - The next year, before you're about to renew the licensing agreement, the procurement departament asks several competing companies (mostly big contractors) for a "similar" product (where "similar" means, cheaper, with more or less the same functionality). Nobody has it, so you get the contract. - The third year, one (or two) big contractors bid against you with a competing product and you have to lower your price to keep the contract. - The fourth year, you cannot compete in price against the big contractors because they sell the "competing" product as a turnkey project... at the low per-hour rates big companies pay. Hope this helps. Cheers