They teach you this in university (I’m an International Business major).
There are various strategies, but generally, good pricing takes into account the costs that go into producing the product or providing the service, as well as other factors like the price of similar/competing goods/services, and how much operating capital you have (i.e. how long you can continue to operate until you break even and start to turn a profit)
Anyway, to cut a long story short. The pricing formulas we learn in Managerial Accounting are based on the Break Even Point = The point at which the Total Cost of production = Total Revenue from the product.
This is handy because you don’t know what price you want to charge yet, but if you know how much it has cost you / will cost you to produce the product / service, you automatically have a figure from which you can make a rough guess at how many units you would expect to buy / sell for a total of that amount. These are your break even units.
Once you have that, it’s simple division to produce a selling price.
Your total costs should consist of Fixed and Variable costs.
Fixed costs are costs that don’t change no matter how many units you produce e.g. Rent (of your office or work studio)
In your case, if there’s just one main push to develop the software initially, the initial development time can be a fixed cost calculated as (wage per hour x total number of development hours. Or whatever total amount was paid to the developers for that initial development.)
Also, if you plan on providing software updates, that is still a fixed cost as each update is delivered only one time, and it’s not every single time that a customer buys the software that a brand new update must be written and deployed.
Variable costs are costs that occur every time you produce a unit of your product or deliver an instance of your service. E.g, I’m an artist. Paper is a variable cost for me. Every time I draw somebody, I MUST use a sheet of paper, and that sheet of paper costs money.
TC (total cost ) = F (Fixed Cost) + Vx (where V - Variable Cost and x - the number of units of the product or instances of the service)
But TC = BE (where BE - Break Even Revenue)
And Revenue = Px (Where P - Price, and x - number of units)
Therefore F + Vx = Px
Therefore, P = (F+Vx) / x
Your price = P ( within reason. If P turns out to be much much higher than similar competing products, this is an indication that your production costs / costs of delivering the service are too high, OR the number of units/ instances that you project to break even with is unrealistically low. either way, do more research and make adjustments)
With all that being said, check out my (appropriately priced) product - Sugabelly Phone Cases