Software pricing can be broken down into several different structures. Where commercial software traditionally has a large upfront fee for product licensing, modern software is often licensed on a monthly or yearly basis. This can sometimes take the form of Software as a Service (SaaS) for entirely web based software or simply as a regular subscription price structure while it’s stored on your organization’s own servers and devices.

In addition, support will cost extra. It is unadvisable to purchase software without support since the software will serve as the backbone for your organization’s work flow. Some companies will even combine the monthly licensing with service and support for a single monthly or yearly fee. This can simplify billing and makes sense if licensing and support will never be purchased separately. Either way, it is important to take the software service into account when evaluating the pricing structure of competing software companies.

The initial cost of the software is an obvious consideration but look beyond that to Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). In calculating the TCO, consider the following:

1. Lifespan of the scale: How many vehicles will it weigh before it needs to be replaced?

2. Included warranties: What is covered and what isn’t? Does this cover likely occurrences or only remote possibilities?

3. Cost and availability of replacement parts: What are the most common parts you will need in the future? Are they costly? Will you need to keep some of these parts in inventory for emergency use?

4. Cost of any specialized labor performed by outside personnel: Is the equipment especially complicated? If so, much of the maintenance labour may have to be performed by a specialist which is typically more expensive than internal labour.

There tend to be four relevant parties, besides your organization, you should know about before issuing a RFP: producers of hardware only, producers of software only, producers of hardware and software, and truck scale dealers.

Producers of truck scale hardware only tend to focus on their core competencies without branching out into other sectors. Although the hardware and software are used in the same applications, the competencies required to produce each of them are entirely different and mastering both, if even possible, requires significant resources. These firms tend to sell through dealers only.

Likewise, producers of truck scale software only also tend to focus on their core competencies, mastering the nuances of the programming logic required to accomodate customers’ demands such as complicated pricing schedules and customer accounts. Software developers may sell directly to a customer or through a dealer. With regards to automated kiosks, some are produced by software producers and some are produced by hardware producers. Neither arrangement is necessarily better as this hardware is not closely related to the fundamentals of truck scale hardware.

Producers of truck scale hardware and software tend to be very large companies and tend to deal to customers directly. Usually, their products will be strongest in the area that the company originally produced. For example, a scale company will produce better scales than they will software, while a software company will produce better software than hardware. These firms tend to sell directly to customers using their own sales representatives.

Finally, there are truck scale dealers. These firms may produce some of the customer hardware such as the weighbridge but most components will be sourced from the hardware producing firms. Quite often, dealers will bid on a RFP/tender using a combination of one of their wholesalers and an exclusive software partner to provide a turnkey package

The relationship between these organizations is visualized below. Of course, this is only a depiction of market tendencies; there are exceptions to every rule.