Running costs of Lessonplan are predicted to be rather low. Primary costs will be time spent creating the system, the the time spent installing it at customer universities and any relevant support related costs.

Our service will be offered to numerous universities across the UK (for now) as a white label software solution. It is a web-application that will need to be hosted on web servers.

Two options will exist for client universities: hosting on their existing servers or an external provider. The latter will cost more for the university but will not cost any extra for us. Both of these options cost us nothing. If the customer wishes for us to provide external hosting, we will use a cloud server from DigitalOcean at a cost of £52 per month (all of which is forwarded to the customer).

Because we are a team containing web developers, the development costs will be very low, we will be using open source frameworks rather than proprietary software to develop the product. We also anticipate that support for the system will be minimal due to a test driven design methodology, designed to minimise the number of bugs that make it into production installations. Once the product is developed however, running costs drop off significantly further and the profit increases exponentially as we roll the system out to more universities very cheaply (with a typical set-up time of 6 man hours).

We don’t require any office space as we can work remotely and communicate via Skype and project management platforms such as Trello.

We may invest variable amounts of money in marketing the platform. This will involve travelling for meetings at potential universities to discuss our solution. This figure could range anywhere from £30 to £150 per visit.

We expect universities themselves will promote the use of the system by their students once they have purchased it. This negates any cost for us to perform this promotion ourselves.