Good point with the potential reliability issue, especially if your town has an unreliable ISP and there isn't a secondary ISP available to sign up for for redundancy. This is one of the reasons I'm looking into making it so that the internet service synchs with a local one like AC, so that if your internet goes down, you still have a copy of your schedule. AppointmentPlease also emails you a copy of the next day's schedule every night at midnight, and makes it easy to make nice printed schedules. Any other ideas in this regard would be welcome.
Do you have any suggestions for the pricing that would make it more palatable? What about my prior suggestion of having significant discounts in the second year and onward?
Heh, I think you may be underestimating the amount of effort it would take to make an equivalent system, if you think it would cost you $1000 :-) I probably gave the impression that this was a project that I made just for my mom in two weeks, tweaked it a bit to allow others to use it also, and then opened it up, but in reality, quite a bit more has gone into this than 2 weeks (I'm also a professional software engineer, my mom's practice's need was just a great excuse to make a competitor to AppointmentQuest that wasn't so awful to use).
Also, are you accounting for the value of the time it takes to manage the web server, mail server, etc? I'm sure one would spend much more than 40 hours over the course of those two years managing a custom solution, especially if you outsourced the development and were unfamiliar with the code.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting things to think about :-)
