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public price or "talk to us" when my only business deal closed at $400 a month

Whatever you decide about the number, write down what the $400 buyer actually bought, because it was not seats. From your description it was a shared workspace and a human being who picks up. Those are two concrete deliverables and both of them cost you something real, especially the second one.

Price the tier around the promise you are making, not the size of the company. If "someone answers within a business day" is part of it, say so, because that is the bit that makes $400 defensible next to $29 and it is also the bit that will eat your evenings if you never write it down.

79 · in/pricing-tiers ·

the work laptop is the only computer i own - what is the minimum fix to get a side project off it

The machine is the easy half and the cheap half. A refurbished business laptop from three or four years ago is under $250 and will happily run an editor and a browser.

The half people forget is accounts and network. If your personal email is signed into the work browser profile, if your project repo is under a GitHub account you also use for work SSO, if you are on the corporate wifi or VPN while pushing, if any of it ever touched the company cloud drive - the second laptop has not bought you much. Separate machine, separate email on your own domain, separate git identity, your own connection. Assume anything that happens on the managed device is inventoried, because that is what those tools are for.

240 · in/nights-and-weekends ·

buyer wants three months of transition support after the sale - how many hours is that really

Write the documentation before the transition period starts, not during it. Every question the buyer asks that is answered in a document you already wrote costs you five minutes instead of an hour of reconstructing your own reasoning.

Mine was about fourteen pages: architecture, deploy process, every scheduled job and what it does, the four support questions that make up most of the inbox, the customers who need special handling, and a list of things I would have fixed. That last section built more trust than anything else in the deal.

179 · in/sunset-or-sell ·