Ask HN: A big company wants an on-premise license of our SaaS app

Expect to spend three or four times longer than you think you should dealing with their IT department.

Make sure you charge a healthy amount for all this because it will take more resources than you think on your side.

Do they consider having it hosted on a private cloud environment? So you guys still control the systems while they can access it securely (i.e. VPN tunnel between their premises and your cloud servers).

The difference with your current offering is that this "instance" of your APP won't be shared with anyone else and you can land a nice maintenance contract, plus keep everything under your control.

A good plan to avoid wasting your time is to give them a ballpark figure up front for what it will cost to make this happen. That figure should not be less than six figures if it involves any significant effort on your part.

If you've already packaged everything up, and it really is as simple as delivering a VM image, you might only quote them 20X - 100X the retail price of your most expensive subscription plan. Naturally, this will be an annual contract, with the first year paid in advance and a fair amount of lead time.

Keep in mind that your email outlining this will typically be the last contact between you and the customer, since they're often simply middle manager types with an expectation that the price will be the same as your "Big Customer" subscription level, except that it will somehow magically run behind their firewall. Your mail will simultaneously give them a heart attack and correct their understanding of Enterprise licensing. If they do engage after that, you can start your Enterprise Sales cycle.

Good luck.

A week or two after signing the contract, they said they couldn't get the hardware after all and could we go hosted instead. I look back at that moment, and thank my lucky stars. Now 2 1/2 years later we would never offer on-site as an option.

Be sure of what you're getting in to. Will they allow automated deployments with updates to your appliance (as that's essentially what it is). Will you need permission to access it? How will you support users accessing it? Often those same 'security' reasons apply. And then you'll find yourself stuck in the old model of yearly release cycles, supporting old versions and all kinds of pain.

Think long and hard and be 150% sure it is worth it.

- we'll start with a 2-week discovery phase, at $225/hour, in which we work with you to see how all the details would work etc.

- once implemented, we charge an annual license of $XX,XXX, and we're available for consulting for $225/hour.

They might be understanding if you told them there would not be updates or new features aside from critical security patches. When they're desperate for new features 10 years from now, dispatch a team of on-site consultants to help them upgrade.