Hey Phil... or Ed... Ok... Philled :),
(Sorry for the delay! We were working out some details of the new reseller plugin and I wanted to have that information before I responded.)
This is a great question (with all very good parts) and you are certainly not alone! It also gives me a great opportunity to talk about or up coming reseller feature that will make, marking up, subscriptions and billing super simple to do.
Although it's tempting to keep your clients tied to you by managing their edits, as it makes you a gate keeper of sorts and ensures compensation for all chenges; it can get old really fast. Especially, as you grow your client base and have more and more edits to do.
As you've seen, Pagelime can enrich your clients experience and save you a ton of time by allowing your clients to manage their website without bothering you or waiting for you to responsed to their edits. With the client admin and branding features like custom URL, custom color scheme and custom logo, the client is still connected to your brand/services and has a consistent and simple experience. Now, to answer your questions, all of those points come down to what best suits your Cost of Doing Business, work-flow, personal preferences, Zodiac sign, etc. But I'll give you some examples from what we typically see here.
1+2) Like I said, I can't speak for our entire user base, but I personally (Tom and Emil too), would absolutely charge for the implementation of Pagelime. I would probably line item it on the invoice as "Adam's CMS" or "Basic Level CMS", it can be whatever you want, you could even just say "Pagelime CMS" (I'll get to that in a second) with a setup fee. By adding a CMS to your clients site, no matter how elaborate or basic the CMS, a CMS adds long term value, life, and usability to the product (the website) so it's a totally valid charge. As far as how much you mark it up, that's totally up to you. It wouldn't be unheard of to charge anywhere from $25-50 a month or more for the CMS in addition to some kind of setup fee. (That's per client, so even with three clients at $25, you're already making $55 extra per month). Another way to do it, is to charge a marked up annual fee, or offer an annual fee for a discount vs monthly to encourage them to pay at once. It all depends on how you want to present the CMS and what type of client you're dealing with.
With our up coming recurring billing and reseller features, you'll be able to sign each of your clients up for a marked up instance of Pagelime billed monthly or annually. You can set the markup to whatever you want and Pagelime will do the rest, bill the client every month (or year) automatically and send the profits to your PayPal account. We'll be officially announcing this feature in May (that's really soon!).
3) This question comes down to your presentation and transparency. There are some users, who choose to completely rebrand Pagelime and call it 100% their own. They rename the CMS, create custom login screens, and urls, and we are totally cool with that. In fact, it's great! That's the route I usually go. However, if you want to be more transparent, you can still sell Pagelime as a "suggested tool" or "preferred CMS", remember, the client is not just getting a CMS, they're getting you as well, implementation, support, troubleshooting, etc. Of course we help you out with that a bit, but it's ultimately you who still deals with the client. If a client was to find out you are rebranding Pagelime, I would simply explain to them that Pagelime is just a tool and that you have rebranded it because it creates a better client experience and represents the value you add to this "tool."
4+5) As far as support, the system is pretty straight forward and we are very proactive about keeping up with bugs and errors so that keeps a lot of our support requests down. And though we do support requests and queries, our customer service, response time and overall awesome attitude is something we are well known for. However, when you're the accounts admin, you will get the support emails first and typically we will leave you to respond to them. That allows you to control the responses and message.
Well, I hope I covered your questions! Please, if you have any other thoughts, questions, concerns, take-out orders, wishes, hopes or dreams- don't hesitate to let us know.
Cheers!
Adam + The Pagelime Team
