Building a CMS, what sort of pricing / features would one offer?

Business
1

Hi,

I’d really appreciate some feedback on the following.

Our team has built a CMS, and are continue to build up on it. It offers the basic page and menu management, with some additional small features, good enough for us to launch an information-based website for our clients who require such a site, who want a ready-made CMS to manage their content.

We’ve spent long hours on setting up, not just building the CMS but also learning a PHP framework and some of us (not myself) are pretty new to the PHP field, so it’s been a good learning experience overall. Still, there was significant development time spent on this and we’d like to move on and build more.

I’d like to know how to find out the average costs for a custom built CMS? Say in the UK and Europe, but I imagine a similar costing scheme in USA, Australia, and some countries in Asia. I understand that different companies charge different rates based on support, experience, professionalism and generally how much they think they are worth. I’ve also checked online and can see prices from $500 to much higher. High-end companies focusing on nice markets would charge $10,000-15,000 for their setup offering a huge range of services and development including CMS and design.

I also work out that the internal cost is very high for the amount of time spent, excluding some level of learning etc., so we would have to sell quite a few if we value the CMS low. Then again, we do want to sell reasonably, and we don’t want to sell too high for a base CMS. We could work on it some more to build additional features.

Therefore, my question is:
a) What idea cost range would a CMS be if developed in-house by a company and sold to their existing/new clients? i.e. the one off set-up fee.
b) What annual cost would one charge, OUTSIDE web hosting, for the service? For example, none. Or a small fee of $50/year or more, much more, or less (?) for maintenance of the CMS such as any bug fixes and upgrading it as and when new versions become available?

Ideas welcome!
Many thanks,
Rishi

2

I think that somehow you’re answering your own question. Some company charges a lot while other look much more reasonable priced… but they charge according to experience, professionalism (although I wouldn’t say that a cheaper product is less professional that a more expensive one. That depends), features and what they have to offer.

The second question is the one you haven’t asked: what kind of customers am I targeting to? If the type of company that contract my services is a small, family company, probably I will not be able to charge much. If my average customer is a medium-large company, you’ll be able to charge much more.

Because even if your CMS is worth billions of dollars, if people are not willing to pay the price, then it worths nothing. So probably you would like to do a little market research to know how high you can price it.

The third point you have to take into consideration is what’s in it for your customer. Let me explain. Let’s say that your market research tells you that you can sell your CMS for $ 3,500-5,000. Of course, you want them to pay 5,000 rather than 3,500. But why would someone would pay the higher rate.

So you can’t say “my CMS has this and that feature”. You will need to explain why you added that feature and no other. Saying that it is “SEO friendly” means nothing. Saying “SEO friendly, search engine spiders will have it easy to crawl your web and index it and that means a step ahead to rank nbr. 1 and getting loads of new visitors”

On the fourth place, it would be what you want to charge and how much it is costing to the company.