Whitelabling Your SaaS

They are not giving it to the school for free. The schools are paying them in some other way. Who's the user? principal? teachers? students? How much value is this really providing to the users? What's the cost of maintaining this software? Do you have a backend server that needs to be up for the users? How many users will you have and how will this impact your backend cost? What about maintenance and support? Is it a one time thing? Or will you have to send them every bugfix, new features, etc? Will they require you provide source code?

How about co branding? So instead of pure white labeling, it will still have "powered by your brand" How will you track their distribution? What if they give it out to 700 schools? There's a lot for you to research and chew upon, best of luck tho with your decision.

Hi Guys - just following up on this and thank you for all of your help on the topic.

I think we will refrain from offering any whitelabeling services and just go down the route of long term cheaper contacts.

We recently launched a SaaS for trucking companies called Locologic.com. One of our customers loved so much they wanted their white label solution and wanted to have a copy. I didn't like the idea much, but we can use the money for marketing and sales. Our primary business is web development agency. I looked at what it would cost them to build a platform like it. And asked one-third of that. Based on our normal monthly pricing it comes to around 25 months revenue, had they paid monthly fees instead. We decided to hire a sales rep for the money they are paying.

In your case, if it's just white labeling it is fairly straight forward. But if they have access you might want to spell out what they can do what they cannot do with the code. Are they allowed to be your competitor? Good luck with the sale.

1/ Whitelabeling is a great business model. Many of DjaoDjin customers do that, Spheremail (https://spheremail.co/) being the most successful doing so.

2/ Do they expect you to provide hosting, support, security updates, etc.? If this is the case, you have to bring up the case that it cannot be for free forever. Your big customer could pay, potentially on a long-term contract (3+ years), and have the schools get access for free, but someone has to pay for the hosting and support. It is not cheap to have people answer questions about forgotten password, etc.

3/ If you are licensing your software and it is hosted on other people's machines, technically it is very close to Open Source (in the sense that anyone can take it apart). Patents might be necessary to protect your Intellectual Property at that point.