4 ms·

> Say I build a website for a company - charge for my time in building the site but then also issue them a monthly bill based on the number of people that have

• rosege 11y ago
  It is a bit different. If SaaS was charging an upfront build cost is one. The other is with SaaS there are on going costs, e.g. data centre costs, usually further development, etc. With the photographer they have had zero costs to produce it originally and zero ongoing costs to license it further.
  • mdasen 11y ago
    I know of companies that will create a website for you that you pay them for and then charge a monthly fee to host it on their infrastructure. You can even charge based on traffic as well. That's a SaaS business model that both pays for the upfront and ongoing costs. In terms of the photographer no ongoing costs, the photographer is likely to have no ongoing revenue either. If I get wedding photos, most likely I buy the number of prints I want upfront and never contact the photographer ever again. While the photographer might own the IP for making additional copies, if I don't want additional copies they don't get ongoing revenue. With SaaS, if I stop paying the monthly bill, I lose the service. If I don't pay the photographer monthly, I still have my photos. So the likelihood of ongoing revenue for the photographer is very low. Also, the photographer does have ongoing costs. If I want additional copies of my photos, the photographer needs to store the negatives or digital files to create those copies. A RAW image from a nice camera can be around 25MB. Storing 40 of them properly would probably cost at least $0.01/mo (on Amazon Glacier) plus fees to retrieve them. Most weddings would have a lot more than 40 photos and so the annual storage cost for a wedding would probably be more than $1. If they don't have them stored, the only copies that exist are the prints delivered to me that I paid for and I'm likely to "pirate" copies based on those prints. In fact, regardless of IP, I think most people aren't going to end up paying for further copies. So the ongoing costs aren't a lot ($1.20/year/wedding for 400 photos), but the ongoing revenue is near non-existent. So, there are business models where the customer covers the upfront cost in SaaS and there are ongoing costs to the photographer as well, but unlike SaaS the photographer is unlikely to see any ongoing revenue. I think the difference between SaaS like Slack or JIRA and work like the photographer's is that the photographer's work is only really wanted by a few people. Similarly, a company creating and hosting custom websites for small businesses wouldn't be creating works that were widely desired. Pizza Hut isn't going to want a website for a local plumber just as I have no interest in your wedding photos. Whether you can get someone to pay for your work upfront can depend on whether it's something custom for them or more widely applicable. Finally, there are SaaS businesses that charge signup fees. It's becoming less common, but in niches that are more widely applicable than a custom website while not having the general appeal of something like Slack, it can be a way to get customers to shoulder some of the build costs while still providing for an ongoing revenue stream.
  • joshvm 11y ago
    Zero production costs? So your time is free? You're paying for shooting time (per hour), processing time (per hour), insurance, equipment amortisation, data storage and backup which could run into tens of GB per client. Don't underestimate backup costs, if you lose someone's wedding photos you can't just shoot it again. Often for weddings the photographer is expected to be there all day, everywhere. Processing several thousand photos can take a day or more. I agree that you have mostly zero ongoing costs once the photo is 'gold mastered', if you will, but to suggest that the photo was produced for free is disingenuous.