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Usually, people who write this kind of software want their customers to pay a monthly subscription per user. They also want their customers to fit their operations neatly inside the features they’ve built into their software. If the product doesn’t have a feature, has the wrong features or has way too many features then you’re just out of luck. Modifying that software to fit the way you do business is something that is rarely offered by large UCaaS players like RingCentral or Zoom. Maybe you can get a new feature if you’re a humongous corporate client like McDonalds or JPMorgan Chase and you’re willing to spend six or seven figures. But not at our scale.
Well, Mandelbrot is not your typical software firm. We are a custom software consultancy that is focused on products adjacent to FileMaker. We do have a few homegrown products we sell, but those products are really just templates we have built over the years. It’s our collection of “reference cases”, the benchmark set of code we have developed on our own time and our own dime. We use that code to jump-start your project so that we don’t need to start your project from scratch.* This greatly reduces maintenance, delivery time and overall project costs by fast forwarding past all the biggest obstacles in development.
So how do we charge for PBX, a very complex template that’s difficult to install and sometimes needs a very special tweak for a particular customer?
Here’s what we’ve done in the past. We have a set price per hour for “dev hours”. You pay for a small block (say 10 hours) up front. We then deduct from that block of hours to install and configure PBX. Once it’s ready, any remaining hours can be used for any ongoing custom development, support or maintenance costs. You can always buy more dev hours if you need them. Once a year, we’ll compare what you would have spent in lifetime monthly subscription fees to what you’ve already spent on dev hours. If you’ve spent less on dev hours than you would have on subscription fees, we’ll bill you for the difference. Otherwise, you won’t be asked to spend another dime on PBX.
So, that said, current pricing as of July 2025 is $14.50 USD per user-month and $225 per dev hour.
That said, in some cases your user count may be high enough that you might ask us to just build you something from scratch anyways. We’d be happy to. Just let us know up front and we’ll go through our typical development cycle.
If a template plus a few tweaks is enough for you, however, we won’t be surprised. PBX has a ton of great features that are already included. You may also want to consider that there is almost always something else you can build into your FileMaker solution. And, if you’re already paying us for the dev hours, you might just want us to do that work for you.
Examples of common addon services:
- Webhooks
- API integrations
- Custom HTML and webpages
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) integrations
- Claris Connect replacement
- Voice recording consent logging
- Web-based phone client interface (no, not in webdirect)
- Custom integrations with existing or new FileMaker solutions
- Live configuration tutorials (you can record them if you want)
- SIP phone registration
- Remote administration and support
- Bespoke extensions and custom addons
- FileMaker hosting on AWS
- Mandelbrot MMS and SMS
*That jumpstart code does still belong to us. If that’s a problem for you and you absolutely MUST own the code, we can work out a separate deal and we can write it from scratch for you as ‘art for hire’.
need something less powerful and cheaper? send us a message and ask for ‘PBX lite’