# Price on-prem for the support reality, not the demo

- Category: business
- Author: Fineas Silaghi (https://indie.md/people/fineas-silaghi/)
- Source: https://indie.md/events/indie-tm-7-timisoara-april-2026/
- Canonical URL: https://indie.md/advice/price-on-prem-for-support-cost/

On-prem is not SaaS with a different installer. Once the software lives inside a customer network you lose live logs, hotfix freedom, and telemetry unless you explicitly negotiated for them. Support engineers spend materially more time per customer on debugging, upgrades, and escalations than any SaaS cost model captures, and that time has to be priced in before you name a number. If on-prem is priced like SaaS, the first production incident eats the margin on the account. The safe heuristic is to model a realistic support load per customer per year, multiply by a loaded engineering rate, and treat that number as the floor, not a contingency.