However, do you know other ways of monetizing make solutions? Or which strategy do you use?
I wonder how to monetize blueprints (scenarios), as whenever you give out the blueprint to someone, you give out the whole โsourcecodeโ? How can someone be still the owner of a scenario, after giving it to someone?
Sure. We monetize our set of scenarios by charging a yearly fee plus a one time install fee. Selling the blueprints is not really viable because people will usually need to modify them to suit their needs and those that have bought them will expect you to support the modifications for free. Thatโs not a viable business mode.
Our scenarios are fully configurable through a data store and are never modified by our customers. Most of them really donโt know make is being used other than procuring the license for make.
In an ideal world Make would be completely behind the scenes (like AWS) running automation with a front end used for configuration. But for now the scenario editor and data store browser are the user interface, and in my opinion totally inappropriate for customers of automation solutions. Itโs just too much to learn by someone who has never created software robots.
As for the Make โsource codeโ โ itโs like anything other intellectual property. We license our scenarios and our customers sign a contract that they wonโt modify or resell the scenarios. The scenarios only run with a license, but someone could remove that quite easily and neuter our scenarios so they can run for free.
In effect Make scenarios are open source in their very nature. Thatโs why the only way to monetize is through support and future services/enhancements of the scenario. If someone wants to steal your stuff they will and youโll have to go after them.
Making custom apps is a terrific strategy too. But in most cases thatโs only half (or less) of solving a business problem. It enables someone to build scenarios and thatโs not enough for most people who want to solve a pain.
many thanks again for your insights. Did I get it right, that youโre setting up the make companies for your customers so that theyโre only โusingโ the scenarios while not modifying them? So that theyโre only paying for their make operations?
That would mean that you offer your solutions as SaaS so to say. Right?
Or do you mean it differently?
@ahmet I am now exactly where you were 1.5 yrs back - itโs how I discovered your thread. I am curious, did you manage to start monetizing your Make scenarios?
@alex.newpath Thanks for your detailed response. Do you find a lot of takers for this offer? Looks like you have built a productised service. Correct?
What do you mean by โa lotโ ? We have installed this set of scenarios over 20 times so thatโs a nice bit of income and itโs about 5-10 hours to install each time because we just need to โconfigureโ it after cloning the scenarios on a new Make environment. The target market is probably about 5-10,000 potential customers so we still get inquiries about future installs and will continue to get the production out there. Plus the yearly license fee comes in after the initial install and configuration fee.
But yes it is a productized service with a particular set of features and functions for a particular customer with a particular set of exisitng software (WildApricot and QuickBooks Desktop/QuickBooks Online).
Thanks โ weโve been working on it for several years to get it this far.
Yes we use our referral link and send that to them so they buy their own Core Make account. Usually that;s enough. Then they share the account and invite our companyโs support address as a user. We charge an install fee and annual subscription to our software.
Enterprise account is WAAAY too expensive for what we want to do. Weโd need thousands of customers to warrant that. I see it only for enterprises who need millions of operations per month and have an enteprise use of Make. The monitoring is done by our clients and if there is a problem we charge them for support.
The main benefit is avoiding hard coding any information that changes from client to client. We designed the scenarios we use to read all configuration information for the scenario to run from the data store. Things like is it quickbooks online or desktop. Our serial number to enable the scenario to run. The mapping of which types of invoices go to which accounts in quickbooks. And much more is stored in the data store record.
We interview our clients with a spreadsheet of questions and all that goes into the data store so when the scenario runs the first thing it does is read the configuration info from the data store which feeds the rest of the scenario. That way when we clone the scenarios we just have to configure the connections.
As for examples there is not much online because data stores can be used for all sorts of things. Just think of it as a spreadsheet that you store data with. We even use them as a temporary data storage when compiling the quickbooks desktop data file.
But what is the monthly charge for? Are you available to them for a certain amount of set hours? Or what is it that they actually get for it? They could also pay 3k and than 10 euros p month to make after that?
So if I understand correctly make.com charges them 100 euros per year, you charge them for installing it, maybe u get a little bit from the affiliate link and thats it? I thought you charged a recurring fee just for your service, but you only charge them when they need your help?
$9USD per month, $108 per year for Make platform access. I charge a recurring $99 USD per year license fee and then $99/hour when they need to reconfigure anything in the scenario that they cannot do themselves.
