# Price against the manual workflow you replace, not the software you wrote

- Category: business
- Author: Mihai Negrea (https://indie.md/people/mihai-negrea/)
- Source: https://indie.md/journeys/mihai-datadriven/
- Canonical URL: https://indie.md/advice/replace-the-bookmark-folder-workflow/

Mihai's first serious customer was a security firm whose tender discovery process was a bookmark folder organized by county and an employee who opened town hall websites every single day. They happily paid 2,000 lei per month for complete automated coverage, a hundred times his 19 lei list price at the time, because the alternative was a salary. The lesson is that software is not priced against its build cost or against other software, it is priced against the manual grind it replaces. Find the customer who is already paying a human to do the thing badly, and the budget already exists; you are not creating a line item, you are shrinking one. Before setting a price, ask what the current workflow costs in hours and salaries, and anchor there.