Hello Everyone.
Does it make sense to help your clients in designing a complex workflow and charge them a monthly fee to maintain that automation?
Is it a good idea to keep the recipe secret to ensure continuous income for your business?
Would you care to share your experience?
Thanks
I have been pondering this.
I am leaning towards creating a pay as you go system.
Perhaps there is a subsidised build fee, perhaps more accurately a set up / configuration fee. This fee is lower than a pure build fee as its subsidised by on going fees.
I have used n8n to create a credit system.
A workflow is given a credit cost based on it’s complexity. For example 10 credits.
The customer buys 100 credits, and every time the automation runs, 10 credits are deducted.
n8n flow checks the credit balance before running and automation to see if there are enough credits. If yes, it runs, if now its triggers a message to top up. Customer could top of through an e-comm purchase as one possibility.
That way the customer stays in control of their spend, their upfront fee is reduced and I get recurring income. I am would obviously be incentivised then to keep the automation optimal and useful so the customer keeps buying credits.
Thoughts?
The way I did this before starting at n8n was I would charge for the worklfow and give an additonal fee for support if needed. I would also try to get an agreement to support the entire n8n instance which can make life a lot easier.
Once I started working here I wrote some detailed documentation on the workflows and instances and handed them back to the clients.