Why Leegality charges a license fee | Explainer

‍“Why do you charge a license fee? This wont’ work”‍

“Other players are giving it to me for zero annual cost, why are you charging a license fee”

If we received a rupee for everytime someone asked us this question - we probably wouldn’t need to actually charge a license fee.

The concept of an annual license fee is not alien to SaaS software. However the concept of SaaS software itself seems to be alien to Indian enterprises

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Why we charge a license fee

The Leegality annual license fee is charged for multiple things - there is no one reason. Let’s call these layers.

The first layer is maintenance of features

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LAYER 1: Maintenance of Features

Each Leegality plan offers different features. Higher priced plans offer more features than lower priced plans. Simple enough, right?

Each feature requires maintenance by us constantly. Since these are digital goods - the concept of maintenance can be hard to understand or visualize. But - digital goods also need to be maintained.

Here’s what maintenance of a feature means:

1. Updates & Upgrades: Features need to constantly be updated and upgraded to improve their utility, performance and reliability. Sometimes, compliance changes also necessitate an update.
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   For example, when we launched our Face Capture feature 4 years back - it consisted of a simple one-shot image of the signer.
   
   2 years after that we began to record a 3 second video and render 3 images instead of 1 for greater security.
   
   After that we added a live OTP liveliness check to the feature.
   
   Next month we will be shipping our biggest upgrade to Face Capture yet - AI based Face Liveliness - where the camera will automatically detect whether there is a live person or not without the need of any live OTP.
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   We’ve upgraded just this one feature 4 times in 4 years. Each upgrade is not a piece of cake - it requires extensive solutioning, design choices, coding, testing, tweaking, testing and stability. We have a 16 step process to take any product change live. 
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2. Bug Fixes: While our testing and QA prior to moving a feature to production is very rigorous - software has the habit of throwing googlies when you least expect it. All software has the potential for bugs or glitches. At Leegality, we maintain bandwidth to respond and fix bugs in a timely manner so that our clients enjoy seamless digital paperwork
   
   
3. Performance Optimization: There is always scope to improve the performance of a feature - making it run faster or use less bandwidth. 

So that’s the first layer of why we charge a license fee - maintenance of features.

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LAYER 2 - Maintenance of the Cloud

Leegality is a cloud based SaaS platform. This type of platform offers several benefits to our customers - speed, security, ease of use and more. 

However the cloud is not cheap. I mean, yes, it might be cheaper than running your own servers - but in absolute terms - running and maintaining the cloud architecture on which hundreds of documents get executed every second is a significant cost item for us. 

Maintenance of the cloud involves the following:

1. Core Infrastructure Payments:  Utilizing Amazon Web Services (AWS) for our platform's infrastructure means we're leveraging a vast array of services, each with its associated costs. From EC2 instances that run our application to S3 buckets for data storage, RDS for databases, and data transfer within the AWS ecosystem, every component incurs charges.
   
   
2. Reliability: Deploying multiple backup AWS servers for 99.99% uptime and full business continuity. Ensuring constant expansion of the server bandwidth to accommodate the increased number of transactions that Leegality customers are doing through the platform.
   
   
3. Constant Monitoring: We have an entire infrastructure dedicated to monitoring Leegality 24x7 to track and alert us if there is any downtime or system critical development which needs to be addressed immediately. This infrastructure has a separate cost from the core infrastructure payments we make to AWS

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LAYER 3 - New Feature Research and Development

In layer 1 we spoke about updating existing features. But all existing features were once new features. 

Developing a new feature requires extensive research on market needs, solutioning with multiple Leegality customers, product design, extensive coding, internal testing, beta testing tweaking, testing and resiliency. 

There is a 16 step process we follow from research to final push to production for each new feature - major or minor.

In the last 24 months, we’ve launched 36 new major features and 72 minor features - to meet the varied and evolving needs of Indian businesses when it comes to digital paperwork. 

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LAYER 4 - Customer Services

84% of all digital transformations FAIL. To ensure that Leegality is in the 16% - we provide our customers an extensive suite of services to help you meet your go-live timelines, resolve on-ground issues quickly and reap phenomenal ROI each year you use Leegality.

"I'll rate [our account manager] 11/10. The way he handled our last week's transactions, the way he helped us save our signatures, the way he responds to our SMS "SOS" and the call landed in a fraction of seconds. I couldn't expect anything more."

- Ravi Bajaj
Senior Product Manager @ AirtelX Labs

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Here are the services we provide:

1. Implementation Services: Leegality clients receive a dedicated Implementation Manager on Day 0 of implementation. The implementation manager will work with your teams to prepare actionable plans to help you meet your go-live timelines.
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2. ROI Services: Implementing and going live does not necessarily mean long term success. To ensure that you see value beyond just go-live, you receive a dedicated ROI Specialist. Their role will be to help you assess the quality of your Leegality implementation, explore ways to drive adoption amongst your teams, do deep solutioning with you for new use cases, educate you about unutilized features that can help you and help you expand digital paperwork across as many use cases as possible
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3. 24x7 Crisis Support: As we mentioned above, software has the habit of throwing occasional googlies. We have a 24x7x365 crisis response mechanism. This ensures that, in the event of a crisis (very rare), you receive prompt support and resolution
4.  Training and Material: We provide regular live training for your teams for Leegality. In addition to that we constantly publish and maintain resources and content that help your teams use Leegality better. 

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LAYER 5 - Security

Security is non-negotiable when it comes to protecting your digital documents.  We don’t compromise on security.

Here’s what security means:

1. Support for regular third party audits that you require: If you are an enterprise company like a Bank, your Infosec team will require yearly audits of Leegality. Each audit takes days and requires significant bandwidth on our part to comply. 
2. Internal Audits and Security Checks: Apart from audits done by our customers, we do our own internal audits periodically to ensure resiliency and security - and to ensure we spot and fix potential vulnerabilities before they arise.

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Without License Fee you get a tool - not a platform

So the bottomline is, if we did not operate on a license fee model, you would receive:

• A platform with features that keep breaking down
• A platform that remains stagnant with no feature updates
• A platform that breaks down constantly and does not work when you need it the most
• Extensive delays in your go-live because you have no one to help you
• A stagnant implementation - because you have no one to help you
• In case of a crisis, you will be stuck
• A platform that keeps becoming worse over time

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Basically without a license fee, we would be unable to actually help you solve the paperwork problem.

Our platform would be a hollow shell.

You may be able to do some basic transactions on it. You probably would be able to see a working demo of it. You would definitely get the green light to onboard it.

But you would not actually achieve your business goals from this digital transformation. 

The choice is yours.

Why can’t all these expenses be covered by the transaction fee?

The above layers require the following - regardless of the number of transactions on the platform:

• Dedicated teams
• Dedicated infrastructure improvements at regular intervals
• Consistent allocation of resources

To maintain this requires a predictable revenue stream. Transactional revenue can fluctuate - license fee revenue does not.

The license fee is not a cost - it’s an investment.‍

Leegality is worth more than what  you pay for it - literally. In jointly conducted ROI studies, our clients have found phenomenal returns. Here are some useful ROI study and case study links:

• How IIFL Samasta increased loan disbursals by 30% with Leegality
• How Axis Finance slashed loan disbursal time by 60% with Leegality
• How TATA Capital Housing Finance slashed sanction letter execution time to 7 minutes with Leegality

None of the above returns would be possible without the predictable revenue we get from the license fee. 

The license fee is not a cost for you. It’s an investment for phenomenal business results.