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Comment by tjholowaychuk | Hacker News Reader

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tjholowaychuk

For me a few things:

- Incorporating the company

- Terms of Service

- Some weird stuff to transfer the existing product "into" the company

That's about it, but at ~400/hr it adds up quick haha.

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Ouch! That is really high for just that. Must have been some really one-off stuff for the transfer.

Edit to add: I guess it really isn't that high at that rate. It made me curious as to what we paid for similar services at the same rate so I had to go check. Ours came in at just about $4000. The TOS/EULA/privacy policy are what ate into ours.

I thought it was high too, I was expecting ~3k. Apparently the terms alone took them 6 hours haha.. pretty boilerplate stuff I'm sure, oh well, next time I'll try and push for faster results if they want the business

You could try asking for a fixed price for the terms of service too. That sort of work is pretty easy for the lawyers to estimate so they might be willing to go flat rate.

Yeah, our bill without the terms was just about $1500. The terms, privacy, and eula killed us.

I just wrote the TOS myself and run my site as a sole proprietor. $0 in legal bills.

On top of that, there's lots of free templates and even real TOS's that can pretty much be copied verbatim. Will possibly have been made by better lawyers, too, if it's a big company TOS.

I really recommend http://snapterms.com/

What did it cost you?

The prices start at $300. http://snapterms.com/order/

I have never used it, but many friends have, and the owner is my buddy Aaron, who is an all-around great guy.

> The TOS/EULA/privacy policy

I wonder if there are existing freely available legal policies that would work for any SaaS startup? Sort of like how I can just slap a standard GPL license on my software, and then come back later and offer commercial licenses?

Our attorney, at least, had fairly decent templates for all. For the privacy policy it was a matter of seconds to finish that up. As for the TOS/EULA that was the time consumer. These tend to be more specific, or at least contain specific clauses, that apply only to the SaaS they are intended for. While many of the clauses are cut/paste, there are sections that are more specific. Our attorney time wasn't spent necessarily on the writing, as much as it was ensuring that all the bases were covered. He asked us a lot of questions and this was the time consuming part. I am sure some of those questions could be streamlined into a template. On the other hand, he knows that if a question does come up, we are going to come to him, and wants to ensure his butt is covered if something were to happen.

:) I feel for you. I had similar shock when I wanted simple TOS and Privacy for software service.

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